Archive for the 'Audio' Category

A lot of the time, most of us are completely busy with work and other daily activities. It can take a lot out of you, and sometimes we need a way to regain energy during the day in a short period of time. There are not very many Mac applications that can help you do this, but there is one that stands out amongst the rest: Pzizz.

Many of us are dependent on Amazon for everything from books and video games to batteries and toilet paper. Nearly six months ago the online shopping behemoth launched their MP3 store amidst hopes of topping Apple in the music download arena. Besting Apple may prove an uphill battle, however. In the months following the Amazon MP3 store launch, iTunes became the number 1 music retailer in the US.

Despite iTunes’ big lead, Amazon still has a lot going for it. If you haven’t yet made a purchase via the Amazon MP3 store here is what you’ve been missing out on: Amazon sells high quality, non-DRM MP3 downloads for less than a buck each.

Back on March 20th, MacApper was sent exclusive video of Ollie Wagner and Geoff Pado’s new app Misu. Since, then Misu v1.0 has been released, and is available to the general public. Now that Misu has been released to the public, I can now go into more detail about what Misu actualy does.

The first thing that Misu asks you to do is to connect at least two iPods to your computer. So right right from the start, you require three things for Misu to work. Two iPods, two iPod cables, and at least two free USB ports. Once you connect two or more iPods, you will see their icons appear on top of the window.

Way back in April of 2007, I reviewed djay v1.2 for MacApper. Since then, djay has hit v2.0 and received many improvements, and new features. Among these improvements include a new interface, live undo/redo, and an improved audio engine.

If you looked at djay when it was still at v1.2 and found it wasn’t for you, I recommend you take a second look. You can tell that a lot of work has went into improving this application. Make sure to watch the review and look for the giveaway at the end of this post. UPDATE: A new video has been uploaded, which fixes the problem with the sound.

How many times have you been listening to music on iTunes through your headphones in a quiet location and you inadvertently pull them out of the plug only for the music to continue blasting away through the speakers of your Mac portable? Well personally, this has happened to me a slew of times and the feeling is truly embarrassing. However, Breakaway from [[Alloc]Init] is the simple application that can prevent this from ever happening again.

The lightweight (<6mb) app can make itself at home in your menu bar or in your dock. When it's activated, a tiny icon appears as a menu bar item (by default) in the top part of your screen. Two different icons can tell you if Breakaway senses that your headphones are plugged in or not. In addition, if you have Growl notifications installed on your machine, Breakaway will tap into Growl and you will get a little notification about the status of your headphones.

A few weeks ago, a teaser page went up for an application called Misu. The tagline reads “Mi iPod es Su iPod,” which literally translates into English as “My iPod is your iPod.” This new app is being developed by Ollie Wagner of Specere and Geoff Pado of Elgebar Studios.

If you have seen the teaser page and have been wondering what this app is all about, today is your lucky day. I have had a chance to play around with the beta, and the developers have sent us a short video demoing the premise behind Misu.

If you’re like me, then the empty stars next to your songs in iTunes are a source of constant, nagging guilt. I know, one of these days you will get around to rating your music collection, or at least that’s what you keep telling yourself. Unfortunately, that’s never going to happen; once you get a few thousand songs, rating your collection will be stuck in a state of perpetual procrastination. Fortunately for both of us, there’s AutoRate.

iPods are the one device that define today’s generation. As we all know, iTunes is Apple’s application for organizing media and importing it onto an iPod. When I bought my first iPod, I quickly realized iTunes was lacking some easy tools for batch tagging my MP4 videos. After time, without proper tagging, the MP4s in your iTunes Library can become disorganized and impossible to find when imported on the iPod. The command line program Atomic Parsley fixed this problem, but was unusable by some less intense computer users. After time, different GUIs were created from “Atomic Parsley”, all with slight differences in features. Today I will explain MetaX, vID Infiltr8, and Lostify.

There’s nothing quite like getting a group of people together in a dingy garage and playing live music together. But eJamming AUDiiO comes close.

The eJamming software is like Skype for musicians. It allows you to connect with fellow rockers over the Internet and jam — even if your drummer lives a few states away. And because you can do this all through a set of headphones, you won’t have to worry about the police knocking on your door after your neighbors file a noise complaint.

Most of us probably rip DVDs from time to time. iTunes can be a very powerful metadata tagger, but for some of us, it is just not powerful enough.

Yes, iTunes has many information fields that you can fill out, but there is still much more information that it does not let you add. For these, there is Lostify.

Lostify is a simple Metadata tagger for M4Vs (videos) and M4As (audio files), the perfect companion for Handbrake. It lets you fill out MCAA rating, Actors, Directors and every other piece of Metadata that iTunes can handle. The best part is that it is free!

If you’re using Apple’s latest keyboard, released in August, or if you’re fortunate enough to have a MacBook Air, you’re already enjoying the benefits of dedicated iTunes keyboard buttons.

However, not everyone is so lucky, which is probably why iTunes controller applications are so popular and plentiful.

An iTunes controller is a companion to Apple’s jukebox that allows you to play, pause, skip between tracks and adjust volume using either keyboard shortcuts or buttons in the menu bar. As more people listen to music while surfing the web, with a recent survey by Olswang finding about one in five computer users listen to music on their computers daily, there’s a big market for these apps.

Apple is close to releasing the SDK for the iPhone/iPod Touch, but with native applications potentially months away, more and more developers are finding ways to improve mobile Safari web applications without the need to jailbreak your iPhone/iPod Touch.

One of the current application gaps is the ability to play internet radio on your device. Fortunately, FlyTunes fills that gap by offering the ability to stream high quality music channels direct to you iPhone/iPod Touch.

Taking advantage of the ability to drag and drop applications onto the home screen (requires firmware 1.1.3), FlyTunes operates like an individual application which launches in Safari and provides many genre based music channels to choose from:

With many different video codecs and formats available today, it is hard to find a device that supports not just them all, but even a reasonable subset of the most popular.

When Apple released the 5G iPod with Video in Oct 2005, the push to take your video content on the road began and new tools started to surface to convert many of the different codecs over to iPod format.

While purchasing Audible books from iTunes is blissfully seamless, getting physical CD audiobooks into iTunes and onto an iPod is not. When you rip an audiobook with iTunes, iTunes treats the files like music. This means hundreds of audio tracks littering your music library and the annoyance of finding that iTunes refuses to place the tracks into the dedicated Audiobook sub-directory.

Splasm Software’s informatively named Audiobook Builder solves these annoyances. Audiobook Builder merges audio files together and joins them into a single iPod friendly audiobook file (.m4b). This process accomplishes several things, including consolidating the book into a single file, creating chapter markers, placing the home-brewed file into the Audiobook sub-directory, and making the file bookmarkable (iTunes/iPod will remember and save your place for easy resuming).

I like to obsess over things. As soon as I find something interesting enough, I’ll invest a good ninety percent of my time just to get the hang of it. Old school Gillette razors, chess, hold ‘em and Jeet Kune Do have all had their share of my attention over the past few years, but this Christmas I avoided a disaster.

If you can feel where I’m going with this click the jump.