1. August 31, 2009

      Soundflower + 10.6 == …. Works (now anyway)

      So, I’m procrastinating from writing my Java app. And when procrastinating, I like to listen to music. Except my laptop speakers suck, and as I’m home alone I would like to listen comfortably without headphones. Long story short; I need to hijack music form my laptop’s iTunes, and stream it to my desktop’s VLC or Windows Media Player.

      Instantly I turn to an old favorite; Soundflower, which provides virtual inputs and outputs for MacOS. Except, it stopped working in Snow Leopard, the dialog: System extension cannot be used The system extension “/System/Library/Extensions/Soundflower.kext” was installed improperly and cannot be used. appears. Thankfully, it’s actually a simple problem and a simpler fix.

      If you go:

      $ sudo kextutil /System/Library/Extensions/Soundflower.kext
/System/Library/Extensions/Soundflower.kext has problems:
Authentication Failures:
    File owner/permissions are incorrect (must be root:wheel, nonwritable by group/other):
        /System/Library/Extensions/Soundflower.kext/Contents/Info.plist
        /System/Library/Extensions/Soundflower.kext/Contents/MacOS/Soundflower
       /System/Library/Extensions/Soundflower.kext/Contents/Resources/Soundflower.xcconfig

      See, simple permissions problem! Running chown and chgrp cleans it up nicely. I’ve submitted the fix in the bug report, and hopefully soon a fix will be officially released.

      Now, back to streaming my music…

      6 Responses to “Soundflower + 10.6 == …. Works (now anyway)”

      1. Notmy Name says:
        September 21, 2009 at 05:32

        Thanks for posting the fix!

      2. OddyOh says:
        September 23, 2009 at 03:32

        Yeah Im seeing this too, except Im still on Leopard. Oh well, Im sure theyre all over it.

      3. Sam Johnston says:
        October 10, 2009 at 03:00

        Thanks – saved the day.

      4. Yun says:
        November 26, 2009 at 05:03

        You can now download the latest version of Soundflower and it will fix the error as well. =)

        http://code.google.com/p/soundflower/

      5. Soundflower | Lagor.nl says:
        February 23, 2010 at 20:43

        [...] found an article by Jed Laundry about the soundflower.kext, but it was unrelated to iShowU. However, Jed was kind enough to put up [...]

      6. Andrei says:
        September 5, 2011 at 07:32

        Oh, finally, not sure why I have not stumbled onto **this** page before. Mere “sudo chown -R root:wheel /System/Library/Extensions/Soundflower.kext“ and off go all the errors (for now)! Thanks for the tip!!

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