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…

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• Tags [snow leopard, soundflower]
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