Ever wanted to share a movie or song with a friend, but you did not have one of those audio splitters lying around? Here is an easy trick that you can do for free on your macOS to output audio to multiple devices at the same time.

You don’t need one of these - Photo: Amazon

• ⌘+space to open up spotlight and type in Audio MIDI Setup.

• Hit the + menu on the bottom left of the window and click on Create Multi-output device.

• Select the audio devices to simultaneously send the output. In my case, these were the two headphones. That need not be the case though. You could, for example, have the audio play through your laptop speakers and your hi-fi headphones at the same time. If your audio devices have different sample rates, check drift correction.

• Change the name of the new device to something meaningful - “All Headphones” in my case.

Voila! You can now choose the new device as your speaker from the Audio icon in the menu bar. Bear in mind that you need one of the headphones to be a USB (or use a USB DAC) or bluetooth for this to work as there is only one 3.5mm jack in your Mac.

The Audio MIDI Setup app is a treasure trove of good stuff. You can combine multiple devices to create some pretty complicated setups for free. See this 4.0 setup for example.

You can read more about it in this apple support article.