I use Loopback and BlackHole both, although for different reasons/setups. I guess it's more an artifact of the surrounding macOS environment at the conception of each project. BlackHole's first commit was September 2019, while Loopback was released in 2016 (but also shares its capture engine with Audio Hijack, and its 1.0 release was 2002!)
Audio Hijack is good if you want to add some VST plugin processing.
A good usecase is having a nice mic for your Zoom calls or Youtube videos and doing basic noise filtering, compression and limiting on it w/o having to run a full DAW in the background.
Otherwise Loopback does everything else like piping specific sound sources from one app to another, without the rest of system audio.
The use case you mentioned is pretty much exactly what I've been wanting to do: run some EQ / filtering / compression on my decent mic so I sound great in Zoom and Google Meet video calls.
I tried using OBS' audio filters and routing through VB-Cable for that, but people in the call complained that my audio was lagging behind the video. If Audio Hijack would address that issue, or if anyone has other suggestions, I'd really appreciate it. So far it feels like "close, but no cigar".
Well suited doesn't meant designed for, and that's not the implication.
The thread of this conversation is why someone might use Audio Hijack instead of a no-cost alternative (of which there are many.)
I'm suggesting that Audio Hijack makes it very easy to rip music from free music services such as Spotify. Thus providing a reason why someone might choose to pay for Audio Hijack rather than the no-cost option.
It's much tidier to have a set of pre-sorted (and if one is clever, pre-named and tagged) output files rather than having one long audio output that would require time to sit and divide up manually.
In my experience if the silence gap is set too low, any pause or silence in the song will trigger a new file for the same song, and if too big, it will sometimes lump two songs together.
It takes extra time verifying that each file is only one track and the full track.
I have opted to turn off the silence detection, record one big file of my playlist, and then use Fission to split up the file while referencing the length of each track. Audacity is a free wav editor that would work for this, but I do love Rogue Amoeba software and Fission is probably a bit quicker.
It still takes a little time but Fission does make it fairly quick and easy, and I prefer this consistent process.
So in my opinion, the auto silence separation is not a killer feature that makes ripping audio significantly easier.
Also I don't think it has the ability to automatically name files appropriately, so you still have to go back and name each individual file, which I handle as I'm splitting them.
