Soundflower: Route Your Internal Soundcard Like an External Soundcard

I have my desktop studio set up to allow me to sample things like DVDs and iTunes directly from my soundcard into (Ableton) Live.  This is possible up there because I use a MOTU 828, firewire audio interface for what amounts to an external soundcard (with lots of inputs and outputs for patching instruments and things together for playing and recording).

I want to be able to sample the computer's soundcard without any external soundcard or patch.  I now know how to do this.

Searching the topic finally, low and behold, the forums led me to my answer :)  While reading the Live Forum threads, I saw a casual mention of 'soundflower' while folks were discussing something related to what I need to figure out.  Turns out there are 270 instances of 'soundflower' on the Live Forums, and soundflower is available for download directly from the Apple website. Anyhow - I searched out soundflower and found it to be a solid and stable GPL app from software makers 'Cycling 74' that just works (sigh).

Soundflower works with Live just as you would expect.  Run the soundflower installer, and then drag the soundflower app into your app folder and run it.  Open soundflower (from the icon placed in your system tray) and you will start to see how it works right away and find the routing intuitive:  you set the outs for your souncard to soundflower and then (you guessed it) when you route your audio in Live preferences, you have soundflower as a choice as the input.  Wah Lah! your sampling your own soundcard on channels 1+2 in Live.

Get soundflower here.