Using Soundflower to play a video in a webinar

So I gave a webinar on OCLC Web Services today. One thing I wanted to do was play a video which was made by Demian Katz that demonstrated how VuFind using WorldCat Identities and Terminology Services. The problem was how to get the audio to the participant.

Option 1 – Play it through my speakers had hope my USB headset picked it up
Option 2 – Find a program that let me send the audio from Quicktime to WebEx and/or Skype and also allowed me to pipe my voice through as well.

While Option 1 would work, it is klunky and yucky. So I decided for option 2. I knew that I’ve read about people recording Skype calls so that they had both their voice and the voice of the person they were talking to. Lots of people doing this used Soundflower or Audio Hijack Pro. So I assumed something like this might work for my purposes. Audio Hijack Pro cost money (there is a trial version) and it also provides recording capabilities, which I didn’t need. Soundflower on the other hand is open source and does exactly what I hoped. It allows you to take the audio output from one program, send it to Soundflower, then use Soundflower as the audio input for another program. Simply put, awesome.

The only downside is that I could make Soundflower the input for Skype, which would get the video is sound or I could make my headset the input. An annoyance but not a deal breaker. What I did was set Skype’s input to my headset while I was talking, then to Soundflower when I was playing the video, then back to the headset when the video was done. I don’t think that was noticeable to the participants. It was an inconvenience that required more work on my part but it was workable. Maybe if I had more time I would have found a way to avoid this but all in all this solution worked.

Anyone out there know how to overlay my headset input and Quicktime audio and push them back to Skype?