WireTap Studio: Interview With Andrew Welch of Ambrosia SW

WireTap Studio is being released to the world next week and I was lucky enough to speak with Andrew Welch to find out about all the new features in WireTap Studio and how Ambrosia went about incorporating them into the app. We also learn how Ambrosia Software began developing audio software and of some new features in Ambrosia’s upcoming programs. Don’t nod off because at the end of the interview Andrew leaves a surprise gift for one lucky MacApper reader.

First off, thanks for taking the time out of your busy schedule to do this interview with us.

No problem, glad to be here!

Can you remember the first audio app that Ambrosia developed?

That depends on what you mean by audio app. I guess you could say Snapz Pro, because it could record system audio along with video as part of a recording. Very useful for doing video game trailers, and the like.

And from there you decided to have an app dedicated solely to sound with WireTap right?

Actually, the way it happened is we needed to work on the Mac OS X native version of Snapz Pro X. For that, we needed the ability to record system audio again, and because it was an entirely new operating system, we had to totally rewrite the way we captured system audio. So in order to test this audio capture engine properly, we wrote a little free application called WireTap which used our audio capture engine, and released it to the world.

We never intended it to be a product, but rather just as a cool free tool for people to record audio with, and a way for us to get our audio capture engine tested properly. It was only after the overwhelming response that we realized we might want to take this a bit more seriously, and make a product out of it! The original WireTap was pretty limited; we came out with the $19 WireTap Pro later on that offered more robust recording capabilities, file formats, etc.

And in less than a week you will be releasing you latest audio app WireTap Studio, can you tell us what kind of improvements you have made since WireTap Pro?

Here’s how we approached the product. I spent a month talking to people who record audio. What I found was that people fell into two categories:

1) They used ridiculously low end solutions like QuickTime Pro to record directly to mp3. If anything was wrong, too bad. They didn’t edit anything.

or


2) They used ridiculously high end solutions, like Peak. But they only used a very small subset of the features the product offered, and in general, were frustrated by the difficulty of using the product.


So we went for the sweet spot in the middle. Every feature we have in there is a result of talking to people. LivePreview, for instance. We asked podcasters, people who ripped CDs, etc. what format/compression settings they recorded to. Most didn’t know, or if they did know, didn’t know why they chose that format. So we tried to figure out a way to let them intelligently decide what format and compression settings they might want to use, and how large it would be before they even recorded anything. That’s how LivePreview was born. We tried to work backwards in terms of the way the product works, not just make yet another sound recorder.

With LivePreview (which is patent pending technology), you can be listening to audio coming form any source, then you can change the compression settings on the fly, and instantly hear the difference in the compression level, and see the difference in terms of how large the audio will be. I think it’s a really groundbreaking feature, because when you can compare audio side by side, you can really tell the difference between different compression formats, and figure out what recording settings you want for your audio.

This is just one example of many that I can give you. Everything was designed by looking at what people did with audio, and figuring out how we could best solve that problem. We wanted to do the hard work for the end user.

WireTap Studio’s editor is well designed and one of the easiest editors I’ve used next to the new iMovie editor, did you create this simplistic interface from feedback?

What we tried to do with the editor is make something that did 90% of what people do with recorded audio extremely well. We’re not competing with Peak or other high end audio products. Again through interviewing people, we determined what things people did with their audio. We then set out to make an audio editor that was really, really good at the things these people did most of the time. Here’s a really good example I think. Just about every audio recording product on the market makes you tell it what file format, compression level, etc. That you want before you record anything.

To me, this is backwards! It’d be like Photoshop making you choose the file format and compression level before you can draw a single brush stroke. So we thought about it from the average user’s point of view. If they choose a higher bitrate for their audio, they expect it to sound better. They don’t know anything about re-compression issues, etc. They just know they want it to sound better. So WireTap Studio records a losslessly compressed master recording that all of the edits you make work from. This allows you to choose a high quality recording even after you’ve recorded it. You can even take something you recorded as “mono” and get stereo out of it, just by clicking on a popup menu.

Let’s say someone recorded something in a format that sounds bad. They either throw out their hour-long recording/interview and redo it, or they ship it sounding bad. With WireTap Studio, they can just change the quality level, and boom! There it is, it sounds better. This is one of the many ways that we tried to re-think the concept of recording and editing audio. This all takes place transparently to the user.

Most audio apps let you record and edit, but WireTap Studio lets you store your audio in a library, just in case you decided to re-edit your recording. What made you decide to add a library to the program?

We approached the product from the point of view that we wanted to solve four problems for people who recorded audio. The bullet points we came up with were:

• Record.
• Organize.
• Edit.
• Export.


We wanted WireTap Studio to be really good at those 4 basic things. The reason we went with a recording library was to let people easily manage their recordings. No need to dig around on their computer to see where a particular recording is, it’s always there in a nice iTunes-like Library. This has the added convenience of being able to search/sort on whatever you like, file name, size, date, even mp3 tags. The Library also allows us to do some smart things behind the scenes. As I mentioned, we have a lossless original master recording, but we actually do a dual encode when we record. We record in the format people say they want, and then also record the lossless master recording. If you make changes to the recording, by say, cropping it a bit, or changing the format, we re-encode the file behind the scenes so it is always instantly available for exporting/uploading/whatever. The Library allows us to present a single file to the user, and do some fantastic magic “behind the curtain” to make their life easier.

Another new feature to WireTap Studio is recording sessions, which lets you time-shift the recording of your audio. Will you ever bring this feature in to Snapz Pro for time-shift recording of your video?

The Recording Sessions feature of WireTap Studio essentially lets you encapsulate everything about a recording into a neat little package. The file format, compression settings, audio source, etc. And have it start and stop on a schedule. This is fantastic for doing things like recording internet radio shows when you’re not around. You can launch any media player from WireTap Studio automatically, have it start the feed, and WireTap Studio will record it for you. It’ll even wake your computer up from sleep to do it!

As for bringing it into Snapz Pro X, I will say this. Many of the paradigms that we’ve incorporated into WireTap Studio are absolutely going to be rolled into a new version of Snapz Pro X (which we’re working on already). Hopefully I can touch on some of those features of the editor in WireTap Studio a bit to explain what I mean.

Speaking of the WireTap Studio editor, I played with it for a few hours and it is very easy on the eyes. How did you manage to create great features in the editor that look so good?

We can’t compete with high end editors, nor did we want to, so we wanted to be really, really good at what people do most often when editing audio. So the number one thing was picking the audio format. We have that nailed with LivePreview and being able to change the format/compression even after the fact. The number two thing people do is they crop audio. In a traditional editor, what this involves is you select the audio, you listen to it, you hit delete, then you add a fade in so the audio doesn’t “pop”, and if anything is wrong, you hit “Undo, Undo, Undo” and you do it all over again.

With WireTap Studio’s editor, all you do is drag the left or right crop marker. Audio that you’re cropping out is still visible, it just appears grayed out, and an automatic fade follows the crop marker. It’s that easy! If you’ve cropped too much to too little, you just drag it again, no need to undo anything. You can also change the duration of the fade just by dragging, and even change the type of fade. It all works in such an easy, natural manner that it makes it fun to edit audio.

We also do everything “live” in the editor, so you can see the waveform distort as you drag the fade, and if you delete audio, you actually see that audio gradually shrink from the recording. It’s not like other editors where you hit delete, and things just disappear, and you have no idea what happened. The animation isn’t just gratuitous. Sure, it makes it look cool, but it serves the purpose of visually showing people what happened to their audio when they made a change.

Another very cool aspect of the editor is that you can see every edit you’ve made to the audio. You don’t just see one big blob of a waveform, and have no idea what you changed or where, you can see every edit. And not only that, you can change the edits at any time. Delete some audio, and we’ll automatically put a fade out/fade in there for you, but if you deleted too much or too little audio, just click on the disclosure triangle about the cut mark, and you’ll see the audio you deleted, grayed out, visible in the editor. Then just drag the crop markers to change how much or how little audio is deleted! We really tried to make audio editing so easy that it’s fun again. Because the editing is completely non-destructive, you can really edit without fear, and dive right in to playing around with the audio, tweaking Audio Unit effects, whatever, without ever worrying about destroying your recording.

After you release WireTap Studio, what are your plans for the future?

My plan after releasing WireTap Studio is to issue a huge sigh of relief, and have a beer. Any recommendations? Victoria Bitter?

Haha, being an Australian I would have to go with a cold VB. How about future software updates? Any plans there?

Oh absolutely. We’re working on major updates to Snapz Pro X, using many of the lossless/non-destructive paradigms that you’ve seen in WireTap Studio. We also full expect to work on updates to WireTap Studio based on feedback from users. It’s great to ship a 1.0 product, but that’s always a starting point in some sense.

And of course, we also are working on updates to iToner to make sure that it works properly with Apple’s new iPhone 1.1.1 OS. We are also working on other secret projects that I’m not allowed to share. Suffice it to say that we are EXTREMELY busy with some software that I hope is really fantastic. We’re working hard on engineering tools that work naturally, and do the hard work for the user.

Sounds great and I hope the release of WireTap Studio goes well!

Thank you, and if you’d humor me, let me ask you a question now. You’ve used a pre-release version of WireTap Studio for a bit. What do you think?

I think it does what other audio apps can do but does it better, and with a whole lot of style. It also does a few things other audio tools can’t do. All the features are easy to use from capturing to editing and then exporting. One feature I had lots of fun playing with was LivePreview. Being able to hear what the final result will be and change the compression settings to improve your final result is really exciting. WireTap Studio won’t be easily outdone, and I personally can’t wait to buy it!

Thanks, I very much appreciate the feedback. We really did try to make the whole process fun and easy, rather than frustrating and tiresome. I appreciate your time, and thanks for giving me a chance to ramble on about our new baby!

Thanks to Andrew for sharing Ambrosia’s new app with us! You can learn more about WireTap Studio by checking out these videos Ambrosia has posted.

And now for the free schwag I mentioned above. If you’d like to win a copy of WireTap Studio (and who wouldn’t?), leave a comment below telling us, “features you’d like to see in WireTap Studio”. Winners will be announced in a week.