I tried a few solutions including vbaudio’s, but they all required pre-configuring and adding in an extra layer of complexity. I just want simplicity and less IT tasks when doing music, as it either costs me money or costs me free time.
The best tool was a command line one, but it would really struggle on a moderate project.
On my desktop machine I have multi-client audio as part of my hardware, so as long as sample rates match it’s fine. It was more a convenience thing when on the move using a W10/11 laptop and onboard audio via headphones.
Mac just does it out the box and so convenient you don’t even consider that it could be a problem on other devices. As an example: I can plug in an audio interface for my mic/guitar, and then monitor it via the onboard audio interface and out through the macbook speakers, plus open any other app that has audio.
That would be an incredibly complicated task to achieve on Windows due to the nature of it’s drivers and lack of aggregate device support.
So my point was more that I hope this is part of the ASIO system drivers discussed at the top. As it would help a lot of people who just want to plug a MIDI keyboard in and songwrite via the device speakers (Which the macbooks work very well), or simply mix via the headphone port, and it doesn’t kill the ability to open an audio file someone has sent, or browser audio.