I have a Roku player which I connect to my monitor and until recently I had it connected to a stereo receiver with surround sound speakers. Unfortunately my receiver blew a fuse during a recent thunderstorm and right now I cannot afford to purchase another one. I was able to reconnect my Mac Mini to an old set of Altec Lansing PC speakers setup with two front, two rear and a bass speaker. However, I didn’t know how I was going to connect the Roku to it. I was going to connect it through the Aux input, however it would require an adapter to connect RCA cables with a 2.5 mm male 4 conductor cable. This is the one cable or adapter that I don’t have. Then I remembered that the Mac Mini had an audio in connection. I wondered if I connect the Roku’s audio into the Mac Mini input if that would work. When I connected it I could see the audio was coming in under the sound preference, but I couldn’t hear the sound.

I wanted a simple solution that was easy to use. I Googled the problem and found a free app from Rogue Amoeba called LineIn. It is a very simple app. You simply choose whether you connect to the default input or through USB and then do the same thing for output. Then hit Pass Thru and it just works. It sounds great and is super easy to use. According to the Rogue Amoeba site it replaces the “Play input through output device option that was available in OS 9”.