A macOS output component for foobar2000 that renders playback through AVFoundation. It ships a dual-engine design — pick one of two spatial modes from the component's preferences page, each backed by a different AVFoundation renderer:
Routes playback through AVSampleBufferAudioRenderer, so your music taps straight into macOS
Spatial Audio — spatialized stereo with dynamic head tracking, driven from the system Control
Center exactly like Apple Music. No setup: enable it and it follows your AirPods.
A headphone-only virtual 5.1 renderer: it reconstructs a full 5.1 speaker field — every
speaker freely placeable anywhere around the listener — in-process through Apple's high-quality
HRTF (HRTFHQ). Even two-channel music is drawn into that field by an optimized STFT
primary/ambient upmix to 5.1.
The project builds with CMake. You need the Command Line Tools (xcode-select --install)
and CMake; Xcode.app is not required.
git submodule update --init --recursive # fetch the foobar2000 SDK
./build.sh # -> dist/mac/foo_out_avfoundation.componentbuild.sh is a thin wrapper over cmake -S . -B build -G Ninja && cmake --build build,
which compiles the vendored SDK from source as part of the build. Pass Debug or Release
to build.sh (default Release); set CODESIGN_IDENTITY for a signed build (ad-hoc by
default). Prefer an IDE? Generate an Xcode project on demand with cmake -S . -B build-xcode -G Xcode.
Working on the engine internals? The output-pipeline contract and design notes live in
docs/memo.md; the hard rules are in AGENTS.md.
- AirPods + the DSP Manager preferences page → choppy playback (known, unsolved). Only on Bluetooth (AirPods) while that specific page is shown, and only with this output. Sampled exhaustively (foobar2000 and coreaudiod, normal vs choppy): both processes are byte-for-byte identical and healthy — it's a scheduling/timing artifact in AVFoundation's out-of-process audio delivery, below this plugin, so it isn't fixable here. Transient; doesn't affect normal use.
-
source is stallingshown on stop (matches CoreAudio output; treated as benign for now) - Custom head-tracking for Virtual Surround.
- Custom DSP routing around the
AVAudioEnvironmentNode
This project is free and open-source. If you like it, please consider:
-
Star this project on GitHub
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