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I can connect my normal speakers to my headphone jack. I can also connect my Bluetooth speaker and it plays great too, But I can't play them at the same time.

I have Wi-Fi speakers around and they will play fine, but once the Bluetooth is paired anything through the headphone jack is silent.

Is there some setting I'm missing?

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You can do this in the Audio MIDI Setup built into recent editions of OSX:

  1. Open up the Audio MIDI Setup application (located in the applications/utilities folder)
  2. On the "audio devices" window that opens up you'll see a list of devices on the left and a little plus icon in the bottom left hand corner. Click the plus icon.
  3. Click "Create multi-output device" (on older versions of OSX you may only have the option to Create Aggregate device)
  4. Add the different devices you need to this new device.

You're done, now you can send audio to this new device as if it were a single audio output.

Extra side note: You can change the name of the multi-output device if you want, something like "mic jack and bluetooth speakers".

Enjoy!

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  • thanks! Worked! Note: you have to go into systems preferences and then select the speakers under 'sound'/'output', can also compensate for speakers being a bit out of synch by checking the 'drift correction' box in the audio midi set up window. Enjoy!
    – user59927
    Commented Oct 20, 2013 at 23:22
  • I am a longtime apple user and this seemed like a simple and easy solution. However, when I followed these steps it wiped out all of my audio devices and now my iMac has no sound and suffers from a great reduction in speed due to a regularly occurring rainbow spiral any time it looks for an output. As of now I have been unable to resolve this issue. Various message boards are inconclusive on a fix.
    – user66074
    Commented Dec 30, 2013 at 23:38
  • This worked for me smashingly on OSX 10.10 (Yosemite). Thanks!
    – thornomad
    Commented Mar 19, 2015 at 4:45
  • Just tried this with the built-in speakers of my MacBook plus a bluetooth headset on 10.11 and got it to work. Will try if I can use two bluetooth headphones...
    – Daniel Furrer
    Commented Apr 23, 2016 at 13:03
  • 2
    to select the output, an alternative is to alt-click the volume button in the menu bar
    – Yannick Wurm
    Commented Jan 1, 2018 at 12:05

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