AudioCircle
Audio/Video Gear and Systems => The Apple Core => Topic started by: Crimson on 8 Feb 2008, 02:23 pm
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I've put together a quick list of links to applications that some of you may find useful. Some I've tried/use while others are quite popular. Some are free, others aren't.
List updated as of 10-20-12:
Players/Rippers/Converters:
Pure Music (http://www.pure-music-player.com/)
Amarra (http://www.sonicstudio.com/amarra/index.html)
iTunes (http://www.apple.com/itunes/download/)
Cog (http://cogx.org/)
VLC (http://www.videolan.org/vlc/)
xAct (http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/14246)
Sound Grinder (http://www.monkey-tools.com/soundgrinder/)
Max (http://www.sbooth.org/Max/)
X Lossless Decoder (http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/23430/x-lossless-decoder)
Media Rage (http://www.chaoticsoftware.com/ProductPages/MediaRage.html)
Play (http://sbooth.org/Play/)
Audirvana (http://audirvana.com/)
Decibel (http://sbooth.org/Decibel/)
Fidelia (http://www.audiofile-engineering.com/fidelia/)
Remote Control/Streaming:
Remote (http://www.apple.com/itunes/remote/)
Simplify Media (http://www.tuaw.com/2008/08/14/simplify-media-for-iphone/)
Remote Buddy (http://www.iospirit.com/index.php?mode=view&obj_type=infogroup&obj_id=24&o_infogroup_objcode=infogroup-23&sid=5844649Ga44c3a12a531a022)
Signal (http://www.alloysoft.com/)
RealVNC (http://realvnc.com/)
Chicken of the VNC (http://sourceforge.net/projects/cotvnc/)
Airfoil (http://rogueamoeba.com/airfoil/mac/)
Recording/Editing:
Audacity (http://audacity.sourceforge.net/)
Sound Studio (http://www.felttip.com/blog/sound-studio-3/)
Pure Vinyl (http://www.channld.com/pure-vinyl.html)
Amadeus (http://www.hairersoft.com/AmadeusPro/AmadeusPro.html)
Audio Hijack Pro (http://rogueamoeba.com/audiohijackpro/)
Virtualization:
Canz3D (http://www.midnightwalrus.com/Canz3D/)
Duplicate Finder:
Dupe Guru ME (http://www.hardcoded.net/dupeguru_me/)
RTA:
Mac the Scope (http://www.channld.com/mts.html)
Fuzz Measure (http://www.supermegaultragroovy.com/products/FuzzMeasure/buy.html)
Signal Generator:
Waavbox (http://www.channld.com/wvbx.html)
Backup:
CarbonCopyCloner (http://www.bombich.com/software/ccc.html)
Super Duper (http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html)
If you have any applications not listed that you find useful, please share with the group.
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Useful post - thanks, Crimson :thumb:
What do you think of Super Duper for data back up?
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Hey, thanks. I should've included one of the best backup utilities. It's also now comletely compatible with Leopard, and is great for making clones.
More info here (http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html).
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http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/23430/x-lossless-decoder
Dont forget this converter. It will convert a song per processor, which is really nice. I have a quad so it is encoding/decoding 4 at a time. Its free plus its a great piece of software.
Mike
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http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/23430/x-lossless-decoder
Dont forget this converter. It will convert a song per processor, which is really nice. I have a quad so it is encoding/decoding 4 at a time. Its free plus its a great piece of software.
Mike
Good one. Thanks.
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FuzzMeasure is another RTA for Mac. Available here http://www.supermegaultragroovy.com/products/FuzzMeasure/buy.html
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FuzzMeasure is another RTA for Mac. Available here http://www.supermegaultragroovy.com/products/FuzzMeasure/buy.html
Thanks. I'm going to try that out (and I like the name supermegaultragroovy).
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How about a Ripper category? Max, iTunes, xACT come to mind.
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Good idea for a sticky post!
I'll include my support for VLC, Cog, Max, and SuperDuper. Let me add:
Amadeus Pro (http://www.hairersoft.com/) ($40)
xACT (http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/14246) (freeware)
and AppFresh (http://metaquark.de/appfresh/) to keep everything current
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I've updated the list with suggestions to date. Keep them coming!
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Two audio apps I would feel lost without:
- Audio Hijack Pro: record any audio on your Mac direct to AIFF, Apple Lossless, or MP3 formats and apply Audio Unit or VST effects;
- Canz3D: a crossfeed virtualizer that makes headphones sound much more like speakers in a (completely customizable) room.
Great to see this forum here. I will toss in some more apps on this thread when I'm not so tired.
I use Audio Hijack Pro with Canz3D to intercept audio and listen to headphones with the crossfeed effect. Works great and dramatically lessens fatigue.
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List updated to include additional suggestions and remote control solutions.
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FuzzMeasure is another RTA for Mac.
Way more than RTA and gaining capability as quick as Chris can put it in. Mostly i use it for impedance testing, but i'll start excercising the FR capabilities soon.
dave
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my contribution is www.pure-mac.com
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Media Rage is an extremely use app.
http://www.chaoticsoftware.com/ProductPages/MediaRage.html
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List updated.
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List updated.
And again.
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I posted this in another thread, but its more appropriate here. I've not used it myself so I would appreciate any feedback if someone decides to try it out.
Fluke is a small Mac OS X utility that lets you listen to your FLAC files right within iTunes without needing to convert anything. Simply feed your FLAC’s into it and watch the magic happen!
http://cubicfruit.com/fluke/
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Updated 07-08-09.
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Updated 03-04-10.
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Here's a new player from Stephen Booth. http://sbooth.org/AyreWave/
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Another new, free player. Sounds quite nice. http://code.google.com/p/audirvana/
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A bit specific, but VirtualDJ is a great application for mixing and interfacing with DJ hardware.
http://www.virtualdj.com/
Cheers,
Bernard
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A couple of good players: Audirvana (particularly the plus version): http://audirvana.com/
Also Decibel: http://sbooth.org/Decibel/
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Thanks. The list has been updated.
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Swinsian software looks and feels like iTunes but with enhanced user configuration capabilities.
Visit swinsian.com and check it out. I've been using it for the one month free trial period and purchased it. BTW, I hate buying software but for $20 bucks it's not bad.
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A useful audio editor that should be included: Rogue Amoeba's Fission, (http://) from the same developer as Audio Hijack Pro. Fission has two unusual properties: One, the editing window shows just one overall waveform (reminds me of the old Advent tape deck that had one meter that showed you the higher of the two channels at any given time). Since Fission doesn't do any post-processing anyway, just timeline editing,separate channel waveforms aren't necessary anyway IMO and makes for a cleaner interface. Another unique plus is that it edits lossy compressed formats losslessy (ie, doesn't cause further quality loss by decompressing and recompressing the file).
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Has anyone tried DBPoweramp for ripping? I tried is about 6 - 8 months ago and for MAC it was still buggy
and didn't work well with accurate rip (on MAC).
I had been using XLD but latest update slows down with the disk drive I'm using - and XLD doesn't seem to have a solution ( I 've been in touch via email)
Just wondering if it's worth trying DPPoweramp,
or if there's other suggestions
thx
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iTunes works well for most cd's.
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XLD works well for me; it's replaced Max as my preferred CD Ripper and format converter for audio, although I would recommend either for someone who is searching for either of these operations on MacOS. They both are capable of bit-for-bit transcription from Compact Disk (CD) to Hard Disk (HD).
Why XLD? I had bought a box set of CDs, a Time-Life 10 disk set of "old school" Country music, with all the old favourites and some more difficult to find cuts ... some would be impossible to hunt down from CD at all.
I am not much of a Country Music fan, but it would not be correct to say I don't like Country Music at all; I can enjoy the old school Country music and some (but not all) of the New Country genre.
The list of examples would be long, but for example it is not much of a jump from Buck Owens to The Eagles, and I feel anyone who likes "good music" would enjoy both artists.
So, when ripping to HD from CD via iTunes (Apple Lossless 16/44.1) I could not get the first track of about half the disks to rip without errors (dropouts). I tried repeatedly but the errors were fairly consistent (ie the same areas of the track would fail) and seemingly impossible to overcome. Tracks 2~x ripped properly save for one disk which had a second bad rip at maybe track 10 or so (can't remember).
So, naturally this meant listening with some attention (not background "muzak" mode) to all tracks of every disk in the box set, which took many hours, of course, to identify which tracks exhibited errors.
Not that it's an onerous task, and I'm used to it, since moving to Intel processor Macs I find it a necessary extra step.
I never had issues of any kind with audio on PowerPC Macs, but that's another post. Plus, this was not the kind of issue typical of Intel CPU problems with Audio or Video, which is random rather than consistent.
I first tried my go-to app for many years, Max, but the results were less than stellar.
I had no intention of returning the box set, as it was an eBay purchase from a seller who was otherwise excellent and offered good value; the price was about 40% of MSRP for a new, sealed disk set.
My cost to re-ship it to the USA (I'm in Canada) plus the grief the seller would experience refunding my purchase price for no fault of hers, it wasn't worth the effort required and didn't seem fair to either of us. I decided to do what I could to get a good rip and if I failed, then I would just delete the bad tracks and enjoy the rest.
So, I then downloaded and tried XLD. And I was able to create solid, error-free rips on the tracks that needed a second attempt, even though it was clear XLD was having some issues with some tracks, taking perhaps 10 minutes to finish a rip of a 3 minute song. It was a strange error pattern I attribute to the physical disk pressing plant or perhaps the master.
So, with apologies for the long winded explanation, but I'm putting in a good word for XLD. The configuration is extensive but can be complex, and it suffers, as can be expected, from the "Open Source Bug" which is the Free Software developer's aversion, bordering on hostility, to writing documentation, but I'm willing to put up with that.
When I transcribe FLAC to ALAC it takes about 2 seconds per track, I can run 8 threads, so the average CD-sized set of FLAC files takes about 5 seconds, certainly no penalty compared to Max.
For playback I have used Fidelia for many years and recently switched to Audirvana Plus.
If you want a good sounding, inexpensive playback option Fidelia ($30) is quite good, the developers specialize in audio (mostly for musicians with home studios), the Sample Rate Conversion is excellent, and there is a handy iOS remote app. But there is an annoying lack of documentation, support is mediocre, and the software has a tendency towards bugginess that some users find frustrating.
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XLD works well for me
Yeah worked well for me too - for three years through 3 updates, but last one is problematical with my
drive, hence question about DPPOWERAMP for MAC.
Would still like to get a read on that if anyone has experience with it and specifically if the problem with accurate rip has been fixed.
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iTunes works well for most cd's.
yeah for most cd's, new and pristine. And it can be "forced" for really really bad cds that other rippers
would take forever to rip.
But w/o accuraterip, it's a risk