Audio Conversion to the Max
There are quite a few apps in OS X that do a very decent job of converting/ripping audio to various formats, but few of them come as fully featured as Max by Stephen Booth. You might be thinking that iTunes contains everything one should need when converting audio, but Max really goes above and beyond what iTunes can do, and supports pretty much every audio format under the sun.
Max really is a powerful one-trick-pony, and that is precisely why I like it.
When ripping audio CDs Max offers some of the best tools in the business to ensure your music sounds exactly as it should in any format you choose. If some of your favorite CDs are badly damaged Max can use built-in comparison ripping for drives that cache audio, or the error correcting toolset from CD Paranoia. On some of my most damaged CDs I found Max to outperform virtually any other tool I have used previously, including of course iTunes.
But really what sets Max apart from the crowd is its ability to convert a list of tracks to multiple formats all at once. If you are producing audio for a number of different purposes this should be a real time saver. What’s more Max supports over 20 different flavours for your conversions including MP3, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, AAC, Apple Lossless, Monkey’s Audio, WavPack, Speex, AIFF, and WAVE.
For those of you with serious conversion needs Max also allows you controls for how many processes are used for encoding, more tweaks for error correction, and a full set of parameters for each of the encoders.
Now if all of this wasn’t reason enough reason to switch to Max, the fact that it is a free open source application should really cinch the deal. Surf on over to Stephen’s site and grab yourself a copy today.
This is a great find, thanks Miles!
Awesome. I was actually looking for something like this for a friend just earlier today. Thanks a lot. This looks sweeter than what I found
Thanks! I can now convert the .wavs i would make as ringtones int .mp3w
Thanks. I can now convert .flac files of concerts over to the less sizable .mp3 format.
Before Garageband could export Podcast files as .mp3, I used Max to convert my files from .m4a to .aiff, then to .mp3 (because I used Levelator, which had to be in .aiff format). Max is great, I wish it was promoted even more, so more people could discover it.