BlackHole VS Windows-driver-samples

Compare BlackHole vs Windows-driver-samples and see what are their differences.

BlackHole

BlackHole is a modern macOS audio loopback driver that allows applications to pass audio to other applications with zero additional latency. (by ExistentialAudio)

Windows-driver-samples

This repo contains driver samples prepared for use with Microsoft Visual Studio and the Windows Driver Kit (WDK). It contains both Universal Windows Driver and desktop-only driver samples. (by microsoft)
Our great sponsors
  • InfluxDB - Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale
  • WorkOS - The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS
  • SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews
BlackHole Windows-driver-samples
173 12
13,276 6,604
2.2% 1.2%
7.0 6.9
4 days ago 1 day ago
C C
GNU General Public License v3.0 only Microsoft Public License
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

BlackHole

Posts with mentions or reviews of BlackHole. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-07-05.
  • Use Tonex software to RIP Amplitube Tones without Hardware.
    1 project | /r/AmpliTube | 10 Dec 2023
    I did something similar using BlackHole , with an old Mac, not as fast, but I'm quite happy with the results.
  • HOW TO: Record Audio and Screen at the same time on a Mac for FREE!
    2 projects | /r/macapps | 5 Jul 2023
    This tip is certainly good, but I prefer to use blackhole in combination with standard quicktime, then compress the video to mp4 without losing quality using handbrake.
  • Free Screen Recorder With System Audio
    4 projects | /r/macapps | 4 Jul 2023
    Use the built in screen recorder with the cmd + shift + 5 hotkey and then pair it with the free internal audio capture software blackhole or vb-audio cable.
  • Virtual Audio Interface Help, please <3
    1 project | /r/musicproduction | 29 Jun 2023
    FYI, in the audio industry AI is artificial intelligence, not audio interface. Especially these days when AI is becoming increasingly present in all facets of production, it's probably best to disambiguate. DAC would be more clear (digital to analog converter), or you can just say 'interface'.   If you're on Mac there are several options. My preference is for Blackhole which is open source and free. If you've never used github before, it can be kind of intimidating, but just scroll down and read the downloading/installation instructions and it will walk you through it. There are tons of other ones though like Jack, soundflower, etc.   If you're on PC, your options are somewhat more limited. Cable has come up on a few past searches, but since my PC is used strictly as a virtual instrument server, I don't have personal experience with it.
  • Is Wondershare Democreator Safe to Install?
    1 project | /r/mac | 14 Jun 2023
    Or, if you want something even more lightweight, you can record computer audio with the macOS screen recording tool using BlackHole: https://github.com/ExistentialAudio/BlackHole
  • What is the best YouTube to MP3 converter.
    2 projects | /r/musicproduction | 4 Jun 2023
  • Capture audio from Bluetooth headset??
    1 project | /r/MacOS | 1 Jun 2023
    I found Blackhole and got it configured by creating aggregate device and it basically picks up the audio from the built-in speakers via the built-in mic. I then use QuickTime to do a screen recording and pick the aggregate device as the input.... it works but I'd much rather be able to capture the audio from the Bluetooth headset because I usually work with the laptop closed using two external monitors.
  • Why does Mac doesn't record internal audio?
    1 project | /r/MacOS | 31 May 2023
    Great app. Blackhole is free tho.
  • Can you use Logic Pro as a live voice modification, in other words, can you use an audio track as a microphone?
    1 project | /r/LogicPro | 25 May 2023
    If you're looking to do livestreams, you'll probably want to route the audio from Logic straight into whatever streaming app you're using. Use software like BlackHole or Jack (or something like those) to create a virtual audio device. Read through some manuals or watch a tutorial for nitty gritty, but you'll basically end up routing the output from your track to a virtual audio device, then use that same device as the audio input for your livestream software.   BlackHole is free and open source (don't download an "app" from one of those sketchy macUpdate places). If you've never used github, it can look a little intimidating, but just scroll down and read the installation instructions and they'll walk you through it.
  • Screen recorder APP
    1 project | /r/MacOS | 25 Apr 2023
    https://github.com/ExistentialAudio/BlackHole -- For BlackHole you'll need a throw away email, for others you need money.

Windows-driver-samples

Posts with mentions or reviews of Windows-driver-samples. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2022-03-26.
  • GOTOphobia Considered Harmful (In C)
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 26 Feb 2023
    The state machine example is definitely a very fitting use of goto, but it reminds me of another thing that seems to have become a rare skill but is very useful: flowcharting. Besides making people comfortable with goto in general, it also helps visualise control flow in ways that a lot of programmers these days don't realise, and it's unfortunate that a lot of courses seem to have omitted its teaching.

    Also worth reading is "GOTO Considered Harmful Considered Harmful": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11056434

    And here Microsoft provides us with lovely example of such ridiculous nesting.

    That's a very memorable example, but ultimately the true cause of that monstrosity is a clearly stupid API design; this is the API for a file picker, the recommended replacement for an existing one that they wanted to deprecate. In the existing one, you fill in a structure and call a single function with a pointer to it. In its replacement, you need to call a dozen methods on an object, and check for "possible" errors on each call, even if probably 99% of them only do things like assign to a field in a now-opaque structure and can never produce an error. Then the example code must've been edited by someone with severe gotophobia. (Not all MS code is like that --- they have plenty of other example code that uses goto, e.g.: https://github.com/microsoft/Windows-driver-samples/blob/mai... )

  • Installing avssamp virtual camera driver in Windows 10
    1 project | /r/learnprogramming | 12 Oct 2022
    The source code for the sample can be found here. Check this code out to a local folder and use the included visual studio solution to open it up. You should be able to build this code as is; if it's telling you that you need spectre mitigated libraries to build it you can either acquire those via the visual studio installer or go to Project Properties > C++ > Code Generation > Spectre Mitigation and select disabled (I have it enabled so disabling it could cause issues, probably not though).
  • how tf do you make a driver???
    1 project | /r/learnprogramming | 28 Mar 2022
  • Struggling with Windows Kernel data structures
    2 projects | /r/lowlevel | 26 Mar 2022
  • Toggling laptop touchscreen with a keyboard shortcut
    4 projects | dev.to | 6 Mar 2022
    This project was my first experience working with device drivers, and uses the Windows devcon utility to disable and re-enable a device driver.
  • Audio Programming Question(s)
    1 project | /r/learnprogramming | 16 Dec 2021
    So a quick look at the Wikipedia site of "Virtual Audio Cables" reveals that it's based in n a custom windows driver. Based on that I would start here
  • Question about Windows Drivers
    1 project | /r/Windows10 | 8 Sep 2021
    Given that they're essential and worth about $1.8 million, then, it sounds like the proper solution would be to argue for the budget to engage a developer to write, test and sign a replacement driver. (Especially since the Intel 82930 USB test board is literally used by Microsoft as an archetypal example device in USB driver development documentation.)
  • Has anyone gotten Pulseaudio to work on macOS Catalina for mixing audio into the microphone?
    3 projects | /r/MacOS | 21 Jul 2021
    Maybe corresponding Windows API? https://github.com/microsoft/Windows-driver-samples/tree/master/audio/simpleaudiosample and https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/audio/getting-started-with-wdm-audio-drivers.
  • A GPIO Driver in Rust
    7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 19 Jul 2021
    Well yes. But Linus is right on that one.

    I wouldn't say Windows drivers were C++, more like "C with Classes" (and maybe a little bit C++)

    Also, Windows drivers are usually much more convoluted than Linux drivers https://github.com/microsoft/Windows-driver-samples

  • Driver development using Rust.
    2 projects | /r/rust | 25 Apr 2021
    A more practical resource are the various driver samples Microsoft provides: https://github.com/microsoft/Windows-driver-samples

What are some alternatives?

When comparing BlackHole and Windows-driver-samples you can also consider the following projects:

Soundflower - MacOS system extension that allows applications to pass audio to other applications. Soundflower works on macOS Catalina.

Weylus - Use your tablet as graphic tablet/touch screen on your computer.

eqMac - macOS System-wide Audio Equalizer & Volume Mixer 🎧

rust - Empowering everyone to build reliable and efficient software.

obs-asio - ASIO plugin for OBS-Studio

deskreen - Deskreen turns any device with a web browser into a secondary screen for your computer. ⭐️ Star to support our work!

proxy-audio-device - A virtual audio driver for macOS to sends all audio to another output

bbqueue - A SPSC, lockless, no_std, thread safe, queue, based on BipBuffers

spy-spotify - 🎤 Records Spotify to mp3 without ads and adds media tags to the files 🎵

click - The Click modular router: fast modular packet processing and analysis

v4l2loopback - v4l2-loopback device

spdlog - Fast C++ logging library.