Audio Pass-Through on a MAC Pro – Via Line In Jack!!

A little dilemma this way comes.  I am a satellite TV subscriber and have recently started to telecommute quite often.  I wanted TV close by when working in my home office (the basement).  I had an extra tuner available to me and an old monitor that ironically accepted a video input signal…but no audio.  Easy right?  Take the audio and feed it into the Mac Pro’s line in jack and listen to the sound from the computer speakers while you watch on the small monitor.  Sounds easy…but let me tell you I tried everything I could before I hit the Internets for a solution.

Basically a MAC does not allow you to pass audio through its line in jack unless a software explicitly instructs it to do so.  One way of achieving this is by running Apple’s Garageband software all day when you want to hear audio through that jack (not feasible if you ask me).  A second way is to use a nifty utility I found (freeware) from the mac friendly folks over at Rogue Amoeba.  The utility is called, yep you guessed it, Line In.  This utility once installed on any MAC allows you to pass any audio signal through the line in jack.

Head on over to Rogue Amoeba and check out there freebies section for this utility, you can also download it from there site by clicking the icon to the left….

My dilemma was solved.  I downloaded this nifty little utility (1.5mb) and had it installed and running in 2 seconds or less.  Turn it on select your input device and your output device and you are on your way to hearing whatever you feed in through the line in jack.

A screen shot of the utility:

I realize that this may be old news for some of you but I know that there has to be someone out there that needs a program like this….so I figured I would do a quick post about it.

Enjoy!