Play iTunes Audio During Google Hangout

I wanted to title this post: Why You Should Never Rely On Another Website Ever Ever Ever, but I decided that was to wordy.

Nearly had a heart attack last night while preparing for another episode of KFC Radio.  We’d taken two weeks off due to the holidays and I was getting everything setup with about an hour before showtime. To get the audio to play so that everyone can hear it over the the Google Hangout I usually look at the setup from this post:

http://eschorama.com/setting-up-google-hangouts-to-mix-audio-and-m

If you clicked that link you will see that eschorama.com is either down for the moment, or maybe gone for ever.

Why didn’t I just write down what the setup was? Or at least taken a screenshot? Because I am an idiot!

Fortunately, my wife found a cached version of the site (thanks Google!) and I was able to get the instructions again.

Not letting that happen again! Essentially, I’m just recreating the Eschorama.com post hear, so all credit goes to them.

How to Play iTunes Audio During Google Hangout:

For whatever reason (I think its to try to eliminate audio interference) Google Hangouts does not pickup on the audio that is played by one of the computers involved in the Hangout.

So if you want to play a song, sound or in our case, voicemail, over the Hangout and have everyone hear it, you are going to need to loop the audio through a few different programs.

The programs you will need are:

• Garageband
• Soundflower
• Ladiocast
• iTunes

And the set up is as follows (again, all credit to eschorama for figuring this out)

Setup your Mac Sound Preferences like this:

Then setup LadioCast like this:

Finally Garageband:

MAKE SURE YOU SELECT AN ACTIVE TRACK. Basically, Garageband is just gonna sit there and pull audio but if you don’t have an active track, you won’t be able to hear anything.

And lastly, which comes after finally, apparently, here are the Hangout settings:

What all this SHOULD do is allow both the iTunes audio and your mic to be mixed together. In my experience, the mic is not picked up. Not sure why yet. This means that you can either play iTunes, or speak but not both. If you want to speak, you need to switch the Hangout settings back after you are done playing the audio.

If this helps someone, great! But it was mostly posted here so I can easily find it without worrying about another site disappearing on me.