AudioBridger — send any audio between any computers, with no setup

What it does

A short list, because that's what AudioBridger is — short and to the point.

⚡

Low latency

Designed for live monitoring, not file transfer. Audio flows in tens of milliseconds, not seconds.

🔌

Zero setup

Open it on two computers and they find each other automatically over your network.

👥

Multiple senders, multiple listeners

Run as many senders as you need. Each one can be heard by up to 10 receivers at once — great for headphone mixes or shared monitoring.

🖥️

Cross-platform

Mac and Windows talk to each other freely — a Mac can stream to a Windows machine and back, in either direction.

🎚️

Pick any input

Mics and line-ins work out of the box. To send system audio or a specific app, both macOS and Windows need a small free helper (BlackHole, Loopback, VB-Cable, VoiceMeeter) that exposes the audio as a virtual input — once that's installed, AudioBridger picks it like any other device. See the helpers we recommend.

📊

Built-in dashboard

An optional web page shows every active sender and receiver with live VU meters and connection status — and lets you drag wires to route audio, mute receivers, and pick output devices remotely from any browser on the network.

🌐

Listen in a browser

Each sender also publishes a low-bitrate AAC stream over HTTP. The hub dashboard shows a play button on every sender that has it enabled, so you can monitor any source from any browser on the network — no receiver needed. The same URL works in a phone, VLC, or OBS. Requires FFmpeg installed on the sender; if it's missing, the AAC stream simply turns off and the rest keeps working.

🎛️

Studio-quality audio

Uncompressed 16-bit PCM, up to 48 kHz stereo, with no codec artefacts on the main path. Uses about 1.5 Mbps per receiver — easy on any modern Wi-Fi or wired LAN, and small enough that a dozen streams fit comfortably.

🔄

Auto-reconnect

Network blip? AudioBridger picks back up where it left off — no restart, no fiddling.

🪶

Lightweight

No daemons, no system extensions, no driver installs. Just a small app that runs when you want it.

Use Cases

Anywhere audio lives on one machine but needs to come out of another.

iOS & mobile development

Building an audio app in Xcode or Android Studio? Pipe the simulator's output to your real studio monitors instead of your laptop speakers. Hear what the app actually sounds like — bass, stereo image, the lot.

Virtual machines & remote desktops

Run a Windows VM on a headless server and need to hear what it's playing? AudioBridger sends the VM's sound to any computer on your network. Same trick works for remote desktop sessions, sandboxed apps, and dev containers.

Podcasts & remote interviews

Bring a guest's mic into your recording rig from another room without re-routing audio interfaces. Each sender publishes a stream URL too, so producers can monitor on headphones from anywhere on the network.

Classrooms & group listening

Stream a single source — an instrument, a talk, a video — to every laptop in the room. Each student gets their own volume control, no shared speakers, no Bluetooth pairing.

Listen on a phone or laptop browser

Every sender can also publish a low-bitrate AAC stream over HTTP, so anyone on the network can monitor it in a phone, a browser, VLC, or OBS — no AudioBridger install needed. The hub dashboard adds an inline play button for each AAC-enabled sender, useful for engineers checking what's flowing without touching the source machine.

Studio & live monitoring

Send the mix from your studio computer to a tablet or laptop in the live room. Talent hears themselves with no cables run across the building. Multiple performers can listen to the same feed at once.

PA & venue distribution

Send a single audio source to multiple amplifiers around a building or venue — foyer, dressing rooms, satellite spaces. Anything with a network drop and a small computer becomes a listening point.

Capturing the right audio

AudioBridger can send anything your computer treats as a "microphone" — a real mic, a line in, or a virtual audio cable. To capture system sound or a specific app, you'll need a small free helper that turns that audio into a virtual input. Most studios already have one installed.

macOS

Capture system or app audio

Pair AudioBridger with one of these and pick it as your input device:

Loopback (Rogue Amoeba) — paid, very polished, lets you grab a single app's audio.
BlackHole — free, open source.

Windows

Capture system or app audio

Windows hides system output behind a virtual driver. Use one of:

VoiceMeeter (Banana / Potato) — free, hugely popular for streaming setups.
VB-Cable — free virtual audio cable, simple drop-in.
"Stereo Mix" — built in to some Windows machines, hidden under recording devices.

If you only need to send a real microphone or a hardware line-in, you don't need any of this — AudioBridger picks those up directly.

How it works

Three small apps. Two of them do the work; the third is optional and just gives you a dashboard.

🎙️

Sender Picks a sound source and broadcasts it.

→

📡

Network Your normal Wi-Fi or wired LAN.

→

🔊

Receiver Plays it through your chosen speakers or headphones.

Graph view. Senders on the left, receivers on the right. Drag a wire from a sender's port to a receiver to send audio there. Grab a wire's endpoint to move it onto a different node, or drop it on empty space (or click the X on a receiver) to disconnect. Pending edits show as blue dashed wires until you hit Save.

List view. One row per sender and receiver, with live VU meters, packet counters, and connection status. Each sender row has an input-device picker; each receiver row has a mute toggle and an output-device picker, so you can change what a remote machine plays through — all from the browser. Senders with the AAC stream enabled get an inline play button too.

Sender

Create a stream source

Use any available device to create as your output stream and make it ready for broadcasting to the network.

Receiver

Capture system

The receiver finds the sender automatically over the network and plays it through any output device you choose.

Not AES67 — on purpose

AES67 (used by systems like Dante, Livewire and Ravenna) is designed for high dependency broadcast environments. It typically requires:

Managed network switches with QoS
A PTP grandmaster clock
Per-node licensing

That makes sense in a network operations centre — but not in a project studio, classroom, home lab, developer virtual machines or home office.

AudioBridger is intentionally simpler:

Runs on your existing network (Wi-Fi included)
No managed switches required
No PTP or time clock
No per-seat fees

If you need AES67-grade interoperability with an existing Dante or Ravenna setup, then AudioBridger isn’t the right tool. If you just need to get audio from one machine to another without the overhead, then maybe it is.

Using AudioBridger

The two-app headless flow takes about thirty seconds. Add the optional gui hub view when you want a dashboard or remote routing - it's so simple to use.

Step 1

Run the sender

Open ab_sender on the machine whose audio you want to share. Pick an input device from the list when it asks — that can be a real microphone, a line-in, or a virtual cable (BlackHole, VB-Cable, VoiceMeeter) for system or app audio.

Step 2

Run the receiver

Open ab_receiver on the machine you want to play audio on. It finds the sender automatically over the LAN and connects within a second. Pick the output device — speakers, headphones, an audio interface — and you're streaming.

Step 3 (optional)

Run the hub

Open ab_hub on any machine on the network, then point a browser at http://<hub-ip>:4466. You get a live dashboard plus full remote control: drag wires to route audio, mute receivers, and swap their output devices from anywhere.

In the hub dashboard

List view — one row per sender and receiver, with VU meters, packet counters, an input device picker for each sender, mute buttons, and an output device picker for each receiver. Senders with AAC enabled also get an inline play button so you can listen in the browser.
Graph view — senders on the left, receivers on the right. Drag from a port to wire a new connection. Grab the endpoint of an existing wire to move it onto a different node. Drop on empty space (or click the X on a receiver) to disconnect.
Save Changes — pending edits show as blue dashed wires. Click Save and the hub immediately retargets the affected receivers; audio follows within a second.
Mute — click the speaker icon on any receiver. Audio packets keep flowing under the hood so unmute is instant and the VU meter still moves.

Sender controls (terminal)

Arrow keys to switch input device on the fly — the list wraps around. The sender starts locked on the device you picked at startup.
u to unlock and show the device list.
Enter to lock the chosen device and hide the list.
f — retry loading FFmpeg if you installed it after starting (enables the AAC stream without restart).
q to quit.

Receiver controls (terminal)

Arrow keys to browse output devices live — the list wraps around.
Enter to lock the device list out of the way.
u to unlock and switch again.
m to mute or unmute locally. The hub can also mute remotely; both work independently.
q to quit.

When something doesn't connect

Both machines on the same Wi-Fi or LAN. Mixing networks (one on guest Wi-Fi, one on Ethernet) won't let mDNS find them.
Allow the firewall prompt on first run. macOS and Windows both pop one up; click "Allow" for both ab_sender and ab_receiver.
If discovery is blocked, give the receiver the sender's IP directly: ab_receiver 192.168.1.50.
Same machine for sender and receiver works fine — useful for testing — but you'll need a virtual cable so the output of one doesn't loop back into the input of the other.

Licensing & activation

AudioBridger is honest software. You can run it for 30 minutes at a time without a licence — long enough to be sure it works for you. Buy a code, paste it into the app, and it runs for as long as you need.

Tiers

Trial — no licence. The sender and the hub each run for 30 minutes per launch and then quit cleanly. Receivers are always free, with or without a licence.
Personal — one code covers your whole cluster: up to 4 senders and unlimited receivers. Designed for a single studio, classroom, or home office.
Pro — same one-code-per-cluster model, but with unlimited senders. For venues, broadcast facilities, and multi-room installations.

Licences are perpetual — once activated, the version you bought keeps working forever. There's no subscription, no monthly fee, no per-seat charge. A licence is locked to a major version (v1, v2, …); future major releases may be a paid upgrade.

The full terms are in the End User Licence Agreement, which also ships in every download.

How activation works

Buy a licence from the store. You'll receive a code that looks like BTMAB-PER-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX.
From the hub web UI: open http://<hub-ip>:4466 in a browser, click the red Activate button at the top, paste your code, and hit Activate. The trial timer cancels immediately and the hub keeps running.
From the command line: activate either the hub or a sender with ./ab_hub --activate <CODE> or ./ab_sender --activate <CODE>. A registration.lic file is written next to the binary and picked up on the next launch.
One code, one cluster: the same registration.lic file works on every machine in your setup. Activate once, then copy the file alongside each binary — the hub and any senders.

Offline activation

On a machine with no internet, run ./ab_hub --offline-request <CODE>. It prints a short JSON payload.
Copy that to a connected machine and paste it into the offline form at bluetomatomedia.com/activation/audiobridger/offline.
You'll get a registration.lic file. Drop it next to the binary on the offline machine and re-run.

Moving to a new machine

Each code allows a small number of activations (typically 3). To free up a slot, deactivate the old machine first — see Manage licence in the hub web UI, or contact support.
If you've genuinely run out of activations and need more, just get in touch — we'd rather sort it out than have you blocked.

If activation fails

Check the code. Codes are case-insensitive and use an alphabet without confusable characters (no 0, 1, I, O), so a careful re-type usually fixes typos.
Check the network. The activation request goes to bluetomatomedia.com over HTTPS — most corporate proxies allow this, but the occasional firewall blocks it.
Already activated elsewhere? If the code has been used on its full quota of machines, you'll see an "activation count reached" message. Deactivate one of the older machines or contact support.

Send any audio between any computers.

What it does

Low latency

Zero setup

Multiple senders, multiple listeners

Cross-platform

Pick any input

Built-in dashboard

Listen in a browser

Studio-quality audio

Auto-reconnect

Lightweight

Origins

Use Cases

iOS & mobile development

Virtual machines & remote desktops

Podcasts & remote interviews

Classrooms & group listening

Listen on a phone or laptop browser

Studio & live monitoring

PA & venue distribution

Capturing the right audio

Capture system or app audio

Capture system or app audio

How it works

Create a stream source

Capture system

Not AES67 — on purpose

Using AudioBridger

Run the sender

Run the receiver

Run the hub

Licensing & activation

Get AudioBridger