A friend of mine asked me a few weeks back about a way on OS X to redirect sound from one system to another. I proposed this solution, thinking it rather clever:
dd if=/dev/audio | ssh remotehost dd bs=1k of=/dev/audio
Seems like it should work, right? Wrong. For you see, there's no /dev/audio on OS X. Or /dev/mixer. Or anything, really. How annoying. So how does one use audio in a standard Unix-y way on OS X?
I had another friend ask me about making a frequency generator application on her Mac to show her Physics students. In the 'old days', this would have been no trouble, but it seems times have changed. It's now insanely difficult to output any sort of sound on any computer, much less a Mac. Since there's no /dev/audio device, none of the examples I found would work. Luckily for her, I found an application that should do the trick, but I'm still upset that I couldn't successfully make it work using Python.
If anyone's interested, the link for the program I found, called AudioTest, is located here. It looks to be pretty cool.
