Aura

Aura is a virtual 5.1-channel surround sound card. Without Aura, if you hook your Mac up to an A/V receiver with a fibre-optic cable, you'll only get stereo. With Aura, you get full 5.1-channel surround sound.

Features:

• Real-time 6.1 or 5.1 surround and 2.0 stereo encoding for transmission over S/PDIF optical fibre.
• Selectable 48kHz or 44.1kHz sampling rate.
• Virtual surround if no fibre-optic connection is present (great for developers who want to test support for multichannel audio in their software without needing extra hardware).
• Status bar app displays activity status.
• Level meter shows audio levels on active channels.
• Preference pane allows you to choose a fibre-optic output and also (if required) specify the fallback channel for virtual surround.
• Automatic software update.

• Support for C-Media CM6206 external audio devices. This allows users with machines made in 2016 and later that don’t have built-in S/PDIF to use Aura.
• Should now use the integrated GPU on machines with both integrated and discrete graphics.
• Fixed: Level meter rendered too small on Retina machines.
• Fixed: Problems talking to the Aura driver (which may be accompanied with issues with audio working in general).

• Added support for matrixed 6.1 channel surround sound (ideally for use with a receiver compatible with Dolby Digital EX).
• Improved level meter performance.
• Added an option to hog the output device, which lets you avoid the delay while your receiver syncs, at the cost of not being able to stream AC-3 or DTS bitstreams from applications that support that (e.g. DVD Player or VLC).
• Added a Help button to the Preference Pane, and an Uninstall button to the About box.
• Fixed minor audio glitches when switching output formats.
• Fixed a bug that occurred if you started virtual mode in stereo; in that case, after switching to surround, no audio was generated.