What is a virtual microphone, and why would your Mac need one?

Monday, ten o'clock, a Zoom stand-up. You spent ten minutes in Zoom's audio settings last week, picked a noise suppression level, and your voice now comes through clean. At one, a client sends a Google Meet link, and Meet knows nothing about what you set in Zoom. In the evening, friends on Discord, where noise suppression is a separate switch in a separate menu. Later you record a short video in OBS, and the filters you built there apply to that recording and nothing else.

One voice, one microphone, four sets of processing, each starting from zero.

A virtual microphone is built for exactly this. It sits between your real mic and every app on the Mac, so the sound gets worked on once, before any app receives it. What follows: how a virtual mic works on macOS, which free and paid ones exist, what the "OBS virtual microphone" question really comes down to, and how to tell whether you need one at all.

What a virtual microphone is, mechanically

Every input you see on a Mac, in System Settings, in Zoom's dropdown, in OBS, is a Core Audio device. Most of them have hardware behind them: the MacBook's built-in mic, a USB mic, AirPods. A virtual microphone has none. It is a small driver: a .driver bundle that, per Apple's own header documentation, goes in /Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/HAL, where the system audio service loads it at startup. That folder is system-wide, which is why installing any of these asks for your admin password.

From then on, an app cannot tell the virtual device from a physical one. It shows up in the same list, with a name, a sample rate and a channel count. Zoom, Discord, Telegram, OBS and a browser tab all see a microphone and treat it like any other.

The difference is where the sound comes from. A USB mic sends whatever its capsule picked up. A virtual mic sends whatever a program writes into it: another app's output, a mix of several sources, or your real microphone after processing. The driver is a pipe. What flows through it depends entirely on what is plugged into the other end.

That splits virtual microphones into two families. Mix them up and you install one, pick it in Zoom, and hear no difference at all:

• Empty pipes. BlackHole, VB-CABLE, Loopback. They move audio from A to B. Pick one in Zoom, and Zoom hears silence until you route something in. They do not clean, level or shape a voice.
• Processing devices. The driver ships with an app that takes your real mic, works on the sound, and writes the result into the virtual device. TunedMic belongs here.

If what you actually want is routing (sending a video's sound into a call, mixing a mic with music, splitting sources for a podcast recording), the comparison in Do you need Audio Hijack or Loopback to make your mic sound better? is the page for you; it goes much deeper into routing tools than this one. This page is for the plainer question: what is this thing, and does my Mac need it?

Three jobs a virtual mic does on a Mac

1. One processed voice in every app

Almost every call app ships its own voice processing, and none of them share it. Here is what that looks like on a typical Mac, per each vendor's own documentation:

Four settings pages, four separate processors, and none of them knows what the others are doing. Every other app you call from (Telegram, Slack, a browser tab) adds one more settings page to check. If you only ever talk in Zoom, this does not matter. If you move between three apps in a day, your voice sounds different in each, and you tune the same thing three times.

A processing virtual mic moves that work one level down. Apps no longer receive your raw mic. They receive the finished voice, and they all receive the same one.

Does it matter how you sound, as long as people can make out the words? A 2025 study from Yale (Walter-Terrill et al., PNAS) played listeners the same recording either clear or distorted. The words were equally easy to follow in both versions, yet the speaker's hireability rating fell from 76 to 68.5 out of 100. Being understood and sounding good turn out to be two separate scores.

2. Getting app audio into a call

Apps play sound to an output. Call apps listen to an input. Nothing on a stock Mac connects the two, so if you want a video's soundtrack, a soundboard or a music bed to reach the people on your call, you need a loopback device: the app plays into it, the call app records from it. This is what BlackHole and VB-CABLE were built for.

3. Combining sources

Two mics on one Mac for a two-person podcast, or a mic plus an instrument. macOS covers part of this natively in Audio MIDI Setup (Finder > Go > Utilities). An Aggregate Device combines several devices into one, and Apple describes it as a way to get more inputs and outputs at once in Logic Pro, GarageBand, MainStage and other Core Audio apps. A Multi-Output Device plays sound through several outputs at the same time. Both are free and already on your Mac. Both are built for software that can address many channels, and neither one cleans up a voice.

Does OBS have a virtual microphone?

People search for an "OBS virtual microphone" expecting a checkbox. There isn't one. OBS Studio ships a Virtual Camera, and that camera carries video only. On the OBS forum, users and moderators treat audio as something the virtual webcam simply does not do, and the setups that work all add a third-party loopback device.

The documented workaround uses OBS's monitoring output:

1. Install a loopback device
     Mac:      brew install blackhole-2ch   (appears as "BlackHole 2ch")
     Windows:  VB-CABLE                     (appears as "CABLE Output")
2. OBS > Settings > Audio > Advanced > Monitoring Device = BlackHole 2ch
3. Edit > Advanced Audio Properties > your mic source > Audio Monitoring = "Monitor and Output"
4. Zoom / Discord / Meet / Telegram > Microphone = BlackHole 2ch

Now the call hears your mic after the OBS filters: noise suppression, compressor, gain, whatever chain you built for the stream.

It works, at three costs worth knowing before you build it:

• OBS must be running for every call. Your meeting voice now depends on a streaming app being open, with the right scene collection loaded. Close OBS and your Zoom mic goes silent.
• Monitoring is one mix. Everything set to monitor goes to the same device. If a Desktop Audio source captures the call itself and you set it to monitor, the people on the call hear themselves come back.
• You stop hearing your monitor. The monitoring device is now BlackHole, not your headphones. To hear both, you need a Multi-Output Device that combines the headphones and BlackHole.

For a streamer who already lives in OBS, that is a fair trade. For someone who opened OBS only to get a cleaner voice into Zoom, it is a lot of plumbing for one job.

How to make a virtual microphone on a Mac for free

The standard free tool is BlackHole by Existential Audio. It is open source under GPL-3.0, comes in 2, 16 and 64 channel builds, runs on macOS 10.10 and later on both Intel and Apple silicon, and its README promises "zero additional driver latency". For a voice, the 2 channel build is enough.

Install it one of two ways:

brew install blackhole-2ch

or with the installer from existential.audio. After installing, BlackHole 2ch appears in both the input and the output lists of every app.

Then decide what feeds it:

• OBS as the processor, using the monitoring setup above.
• System audio, following BlackHole's own recipe: create a Multi-Output Device in Audio MIDI Setup with your headphones and BlackHole, set it as the system output, and pick BlackHole as the input in the app that should receive the sound.
• An app that lets you choose its output device, set to BlackHole directly.

Here is the part most how-to guides skip: once BlackHole is installed, your voice sounds exactly as it did before. You have built a pipe. Nothing in it touches the sound unless something upstream does.

A virtual device also does not get around macOS privacy rules. Every app that listens to it still needs microphone permission, managed in System Settings > Privacy & Security > Microphone. If a call app shows the device but hears nothing, check that list first.

On Windows: the virtual audio cable

On Windows 10 or 11, the same idea usually goes by "virtual audio cable", and the best known one is literally called that: VB-CABLE from VB-Audio. It is donationware, supports Windows from XP to 11 (32 bit, 64 bit and Arm64), and also has a macOS build for 10.10 and later. It shows up as two devices: CABLE Input, a playback device you send sound into, and CABLE Output, a recording device that call apps pick as their microphone. The OBS recipe above works the same way with CABLE Output in place of BlackHole.

Windows users who want a full mixer usually add Voicemeeter, also from VB-Audio, which is Windows only. If you are moving from Windows to a Mac and miss it, Is there Voicemeeter for Mac? covers what Mac users run instead. TunedMic has no Windows version either, so on a PC the processing has to come from somewhere else.

Paid routing: Loopback

Loopback by Rogue Amoeba builds virtual devices in a visual editor: drag in an app or an input device, wire up the channels, and the result shows up in every other app as a microphone. No OBS workaround, no Audio MIDI Setup.

As of October 2026 it costs $99 for a single-user license that covers one or more of your Macs. The current version, 2.5.0, needs macOS 14.5 or later. The trial has every feature, but audio passing through its devices degrades after twenty minutes, so you can test the routing, not live on it.

Loopback routes and combines. It does not clean a voice. If your plan involves Audio Hijack for effects plus Loopback for the device, read Audio Hijack vs Loopback before spending money on both.

A virtual microphone that does the processing: TunedMic

TunedMic comes at this from the other side. It adds one microphone to the Mac, called TunedMic. The app takes the sound from your real mic (built-in MacBook mic, USB mic, headset, AirPods), processes it on the Mac in real time, and any app that picks it as its input hears the processed voice. Your real mic stays as it is, and you can still pick it directly whenever you want the raw sound.

Setup is a one-minute Sound Check: you read a short passage aloud in one of six languages (English, Spanish, German, French, Chinese, Russian) while the app takes more than 30 measurements of your voice, your mic and your room. Nine profiles in three families are built from that measurement rather than from stock presets: Natural, Warm and Focused for calls and lessons, Balanced, Broadcast and Crisp for streams and videos, Gentle, Open and Forward for singing. Switch the profile and the sound changes in Zoom, Telegram, Discord and OBS at the same moment, with nothing to restart. With headphones on you can flip between the raw mic and the tuned sound on your own voice.

The facts that decide whether it fits:

• It adds less than a tenth of a second of delay, which on a call disappears into the connection's own delay.
• Processing runs locally. The voice is never uploaded.
• It keeps running in the background when the window is closed.
• It works with Bluetooth headsets, AirPods included, but Bluetooth limits how much detail a mic can send, so a wired or USB mic gives it more to work with.
• It needs a Mac with Apple silicon (M1 or newer) and macOS 14 or later. No Intel, no Windows.
• It is free for 3 days, no card or account needed, and there are no refunds after you pay. The home page also has real before/after recordings from three mics.

One limit matters for this topic: the app is built around your microphone. Sending a YouTube clip or a soundboard into a call is still a loopback job for BlackHole or Loopback.

Side by side

Where virtual microphones go wrong

Silence on the call. You picked an empty pipe and nothing is routed into it. With BlackHole or VB-CABLE, something upstream (OBS monitoring, an app's output, a Multi-Output Device) must be sending sound in.

People hear themselves. The call's own audio found its way into the virtual input, usually through a desktop audio capture that is being monitored. Remove the call app from whatever feeds the device.

Processing on top of processing. A voice already cleaned by OBS filters or a processing virtual mic then goes through Zoom's suppression as well. Zoom's own documentation describes the High level as the most aggressive, strong enough to remove background speech, and notes it may raise CPU use. Stack two suppressors and the second one works on a signal it was never tuned for, so their side effects add up. If the voice arrives already processed, try a lower setting in the app first, and the best Zoom audio settings for a clear voice go through each Zoom option in order.

Crackles or dropouts. Check that both ends of a loopback run at the same sample rate in Audio MIDI Setup. VB-Audio states outright that its Hi-Fi cable needs matching rates on input and output, and 48 kHz on both sides is a sensible default for calls.

The device is missing from an app. An app that was open during the install may not list the new device yet. Quit it and reopen.

Permission prompts. A virtual device does not skip macOS privacy. The app still needs its switch on in Privacy & Security > Microphone.

So does your Mac need one?

• You talk in one app and its built-in noise suppression is good enough: no. Tune that app and move on.
• You want app audio, music or an OBS mix to reach a call: yes, an empty pipe. BlackHole if you are fine with a little setup, Loopback if you want an editor and $99 is acceptable.
• You talk in several apps and want the same finished voice in all of them, without OBS running in the background: yes, a processing virtual mic. On a Mac with Apple silicon and macOS 14 or later, that is what TunedMic is for.

Your next step

Open System Settings > Sound > Input and count the devices listed there. If you only see real hardware, your Mac has no virtual microphone yet, and every app is processing your voice on its own terms.

Then decide which job you have. For routing, install BlackHole with the single Homebrew line above and try the OBS recipe on a test call with a friend. For one tuned voice everywhere, go to the home page and play the before/after recordings from the mic closest to yours (the MacBook's built-in mic, a cheap wired headset or a Hollyland Lark M2); if that difference is the one you want on your own calls, the price and what it includes are on the pricing page.