Audio Hijack is a Mac application by Rogue Amoeba that intercepts, processes, and saves audio from any source on your system — whether that's a browser tab, a video call, a music app, or the built-in microphone — using a visual signal-flow canvas.
What is Audio Hijack?
Audio Hijack is a professional-grade Mac audio capture and processing tool that lets you tap into virtually any audio stream on your computer and route it through a chain of effects, mixers, and recorders before saving it to disk or sending it somewhere else entirely. It's been the go-to solution for podcasters, radio producers, and audio tinkerers on the Mac for over two decades, and Rogue Amoeba has kept it genuinely modern.
The interface is built around a visual session canvas where you drag blocks — an Application source, an EQ, a limiter, a recorder, Airplay output — and connect them with virtual cables. It's immediately intuitive if you've ever touched any kind of signal-flow software, and surprisingly discoverable even if you haven't.
What does Audio Hijack do best?
Audio Hijack excels at capturing audio that macOS normally makes invisible to third-party apps — system audio, per-application streams, and hardware inputs — all simultaneously if you need it.
I've used it to record a Zoom interview while simultaneously running a hardware noise gate and sending a clean mix to a Rode microphone recorder. Every piece of that chain lives in one session block diagram that launches automatically when the meeting starts. The built-in scheduling means Audio Hijack can wake up, start a stream capture, and stop itself while you're nowhere near the machine.
The built-in processing blocks are genuinely useful: there's a 10-band EQ, a compressor, a noise gate, a volume envelope, and a silence detection block that can pause recording when no one is talking. Rogue Amoeba also ships an AU (Audio Unit) host block, so you can drop any third-party plugin — FabFilter, iZotope, whatever — right into the chain.
- Per-application capture: record Spotify, Safari, and your mic on separate tracks simultaneously
- Live processing: EQ, compression, and limiting with real-time meters
- Scheduled sessions: unattended captures that start and stop on a timer
- Audio Unit hosting: any AU plugin drops directly into the signal chain
- Multi-destination output: record to disk while streaming to Airplay or a virtual device
How much does Audio Hijack cost?
Audio Hijack is a paid app sold directly from Rogue Amoeba's website — it is not on the Mac App Store. A free download is available and fully functional, though recordings made without a licence include a short audio watermark. One purchase covers the full feature set with no subscription.
Rogue Amoeba also sells a discounted bundle alongside their companion apps Loopback (virtual audio routing) and Farrago (soundboard), which together form a fairly complete production suite for independent podcasters.
Who should use Audio Hijack?
Audio Hijack is essential for anyone who captures or produces audio on a Mac regularly — podcasters recording remote interviews, journalists archiving streamed radio, musicians who want to record system audio without an external loopback cable, and developers testing audio pipelines. It is not a DAW; if you need to compose, arrange, or heavily edit after capture, you'll still reach for Logic Pro or Reaper. But as a capture-and-light-processing front end, nothing on the Mac comes close.
Casual listeners who just want to save a stream once in a while may find the block-based interface more power than they need — though it does take only a few minutes to build a working single-application capture session.
What are the best Audio Hijack alternatives?
The main alternatives depend on what you're actually trying to do. For simple system-wide audio recording, Piezo (also by Rogue Amoeba) is a stripped-down, cheaper sibling with a one-click interface. For DAW-integrated capture, BlackHole (a free virtual audio driver) combined with Logic Pro or GarageBand can get you there without an extra purchase, though you lose the scheduling, per-app isolation, and built-in processing. Loopback — another Rogue Amoeba product — handles complex routing scenarios but doesn't record on its own; it pairs with Audio Hijack rather than replacing it. There is no direct single-app competitor on macOS that matches Audio Hijack's combination of per-source capture, live processing, and scheduling.
How does Audio Hijack compare to Piezo?
Piezo is Audio Hijack's simpler sibling, built for the use-case where you just want to point at one app and hit record. Audio Hijack adds multi-source sessions, the block-based signal chain, AU plugin hosting, scheduling, and granular output control. If Piezo covers your needs, it's a fine and affordable choice. If you've ever wished Piezo had an EQ, or wanted to record your mic and a remote caller on separate tracks, Audio Hijack is the right step up.
