Perhaps it's time to consider using a protocol that doesn't rely on multicast and the existence of a network, such as Art-Net?

In our usual set-ups (live situation in the theatre) we prefer to use sACN in iorder to keep the network managed and tidy. Many venues use IGMP snooping). sACN gives us multicast efficiency and native priority handling (not to speak of a sound way to correctly name the first universe 😏). Also for large installs or in the case that we need to copy universes and process them (FollowMe, etc.) the speed of sACN is generally higher than that of an ArtNet system.

We also preferr not to output both sACN and Artnet over our networks. Lastly we would like to be able to switch back and forth between our Capture and real world in tech, so we can continue programming when the venue is needed for other shows. So that is the reason why we prefer to use sACN and we hope to get it working in those places witouth a proper network solution, so we can continue working on our standalone laptop.

Things are uncharacteristically calm ahead of the release so we found some time to dig into this and perform some tests on macOS. As a result we will be making it possible to select the loopback interface for protocols in Capture 2026's option on macOS (this was already possible on Windows).

It's worth noting that macOS does a fair bit of magic with regard to the system's routing table and specifically the loopback adapter, depending on the status of your other network interfaces. For instance it seems that multicast groups are only routed to the localhost interface if no other interfaces are present and active.