New Audio Products for Mac OS X Excite Reader

Curious__George writes "I'm excited about a couple of new tools for audio for Mac OS X. One is the freeware WireTap from Ambrosia, which allows you to record any audio playing on your Mac, saving it to a file for later listening or processing. Its functionality will be built into an upcoming edition of Ambrosia's Snapz Pro X screen capture product. The other is a product that will be shipping by the end of the summer from Griffin called RadioSHARK (retail: $49.95), which is essentially a radio TiVo for your Mac: a software-controlled AM/FM radio that allows you to record radio programs (either local or Internet broadcast). I'll never miss a broadcast of This American Life again!" Curious__George might also get excited about the new Detour from Rogue Amoeba -- makers of AudioHijack, a predecessor to WireTap that has more capabilities -- which allows detouring sound output from different apps to different devices.

Comments

I thought

[leifm]

for a second there that Excite had created their own Acrobat Reader-like software for OS X...

Re:I thought

[Anonymous Coward]

And I thought there was no software for the ever beleaguered Mac! Seriously, Ambrosia rules and Captain Hector is a heck of an enforcer.

Incorrect URL in Article

[medeii]

The URL points to Griffin Technologies, a strange manufacturer with a poorly-designed site. It should point to Griffin Technology instead.

Re:Incorrect URL in Article

[switcha]

he URL points to Griffin Technologies, a strange manufacturer

Or maybe the submitter of a non-story to slashdot whom accidently submitted his own roller cleaner website instead of the great peripheral manufacturer...

Other great recording app...

[Anonymous Coward]

Radio Free is another great ap for recording audio, but its a bit hard to find these days.

Detour == sweet

[GoRK]

Man that detour app looks killer. I sure wish something like that had been available on windows about 3 years ago when I really needed it. Ah well, at least it's fairly easy to do on Linux.. :)

~GoRK

Thanks for the brilliant link

[switcha]

to streaming archives of the show you won't have to miss

Re:Thanks for the brilliant link

[mkoz]

Some of us prefer adio formats that:
1. don't suck.
2. are more portable than real audio.

From someone who has been recording and mp3 encoding TAL for the past several years. It was not hard to do this with AppleScript and Mpegger...

Re:Thanks for the brilliant link

[brianjcain]

I agree that the "adio" format is unimpressive. But portability is a solvable problem. I've been using vsound and speexenc to make episodes portable (like for listening at work, where I don't have access.)

Hey not fair

[seinman]

I'm a Slashdot reader, and i'm excited about the massive amount of pornography that I downloaded this morning. Where's my story?

Re:Hey not fair

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you submit it?

Stream Ripper

[jamienk]

http://streamripperx.sourceforge.net/

Stream Ripper is GPL and good enough (records streaming web broadcasts to MP3).

Re:Stream Ripper

[Anonymous Coward]

Much more powerful than StreamRipperX... Try RadioLover. Records multiple streams at the same time, and chops up the stream into songs or segments!

[source: website]
- Record Internet radio streams as individual MP3 songs
- Schedule recordings of your favourite daily or weekly shows
- Record multiple radio streams at the same time
- Split and organise recordings by song, time, or size
- Import radio streams from the Web and iTunes 3 or 4
- Automatically save, file and tag MP3s
- International language streams supported
- Record from thousands of Internet radio stations

Re:Stream Ripper

[scrod]

If you look at the source you'll see that it simply uses curl -L to do this. Stream Ripper X is mostly just a pretty interface for that and a couple of other minor features.

Re:Stream Ripper

[Anonymous Coward]

StreamRipperX uses both libcurl and curl. It is not just an interface wrapper around a command-line.

I seem to remember...

[bennomatic]

I hope this isn't too off-topic, but wasn't there once something that let a Mac monitor the subtitles (i.e. for hearing impaired) channel of a TV broadcast looking for certain words. So for example, you could set it to watch for "Iraq" or "President" or "international oil-mongering conspiracy", and when it caught those words, it would pop up a video feed on-screen...

Is there anything like that around today that compatible (both hardware and software required for this one) with current Macs?

Confusing title

[Thing 1]

I am an Excite reader (I read it for news daily, in addition to /.), so I read it as "new audio products for Mac OS X [including] Excite reader".

I was all set to read about a text-to-speech enhancement for OS X. Laugh at me.

Re:Confusing title

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not an Excite user, but read the title the same way

What I want is a DVD player app that handles dolby

[goombah99]

The apple DVD player does not decode the DOLBY DTS digital 5.1 sound. (It does permit the 2-channel emulation via dolby pro-logic available on all home theater systems or sonicas). The only multi-channel audio dvd player for mac osx is the VLC player and frankly its buggy as hell and without hardware acceleration (that the apple product uses), its video chatters.

the new G5 computers have optical outputs, perfect for multi-channel sound. So when is apple going to release a multi-channel aware dvd player app?? anyone heard any rumors?

Orderin Griffin stuff? Order from a reseller.

[Anonymous Coward]

Griffin's retail support sucked ass when I ordered my PowerMate. They shipped it Airborne, Airborne lost it (claimed to have dropped at door, no signature--someone was at home all day). Airborne said to call Griffin. Griffin said to call Airborne. This went on for days.

In a particularly galling example of piss poor customer service, a Griffin rep claimed they "had no legal obligation" to reship or refund. They found out otherwise when they got the chargeback from my bank, I imagine.

Successfully ordered without incident from Small Dog Electronics (no affiliation except as a satisfied customer).

Re:Orderin Griffin stuff? Order from a reseller.

[Erasei]

I, on the other hand, had the exact opposite happen. Well, mostly opposite (is that even possible?) Anyway..

I was going to order from macmall.com simply because I have dealt with them several times before, including my iBook purchase. They were even a couple of bucks cheaper for my PowerMate and the iMic (rca, line input to usb for audio in for computers with no audio in) so I figured I'd save a couple of bucks. Turns out, that macmall charges twice what Griffon charges for shipping. Both use Airborne Two Day. So I ordered directly from Griffon, saved a few bucks in shipping charges and the products arrived two days later, tightly packaged and in 100% working condition. Can't wait to snag this new product from them as soon as it's released. Finally can catch up on my UK Radio1 broadcasts.

Re:Orderin Griffin stuff? Order from a reseller.

[Anonymous Coward]

Glad to hear things went well in your case. In mine, Airborne was primarily the one who dropped the ball, but Griffin's response to it was the wrong answer. They could have filed a claim with Airborne and reshipped rather than being combative and losing even more money on the chargeback. Ill will and bad business in my case.

I don't recall what Small Dog's shipping charges were, but I don't remember them being particularly outrageous.

Re:Orderin Griffin stuff? Order from a reseller.

[FredFnord]

> They could have filed a claim with Airborne and reshipped

Actually, probably not. Many companies that have a reasonably high shipping volume have an arrangement with the shipper whereby they don't insure anything for loss in return for significantly lower prices. Part of the deal is, basically, 'unless we [Airborne] lose more than X amount of goods in a quarter, any of our losses are your problem'.

So I suspect that the person at Griffin was, well, we'll be charitable and call him/her confused. While it was clearly Airbourne's *fault*, it quite possibly wasn't their *responsibility*, depending on their contract.

-fred

PS: I've dealt with Griffin three or four times, including one where their package got lost on the way to me. They didn't have any more of the item (a monitor adaptor with sync-on-green support) in stock, so they refunded my money to my credit card. Three weeks later they sent me one gratis. (In the mean time I'd found one elsewhere, but that was still pretty nice.)

Re:Orderin Griffin stuff? Order from a reseller.

[Anonymous Coward]

That's interesting--I didn't realize shippers made those sorts of arrangements. I guess if one were shippping a large number of relatively low value items, it'd be a good deal. Can't imagine a company that shipped gold bullion or laptops doing it, though :).

Area Moderators on Crack

[Anonymous Coward]

WTF? This has nothing to do with the article. They're talking about recording off of FM radio, while streamripper is for internet streams.

This American Life

[vivekb]

Offtopic: if you really enjoy This American Life, consider getting a subscription from Audible.com. Without listener support, TAL (and public radio in general) won't last.

And the sound quality is better than live recording would be, as well.

Re:This American Life

[Anonymous Coward]

But that's not stealing! What, are you one of those wild-eyed law and order fanatics?

Re:This American Life

[derch]

This raises a question - Is it ethical to regularly listen to TAL in any broadcast form without contributing to it or your local public station?

Re:This American Life

[Triv]

I didn't SAY it was stealing; I said it was an extra little way of supporting the artists who write This American Life's stories.

Re:What I want is a DVD player app that handles do

[Visigothe]

no rumours.. it's in Panther. Just wait 2 months

Re:What I want is a DVD player app that handles do

[AvantLegion]

There's no such thing as "DOLBY DTS".

Dolby and DTS are competing companies, with different, competing formats that each bear their name.

More new stuff!!

[bangalla]

The quantity of good quality software being written for OS X is amazing. A big thankyou to all of the Mac developers, especially the new ones, who are helping to build such a great desktop platform. Good freeware tools are essential to keep the platform growing. Once people move over to the Mac they can then start looking at more professional packages if they want them, but being able to do everything they'd like to try as soon as they get their Mac is an invaluable point when considering a switch. The Mac user community needs to educate their peers about how good our platform is with clear examples of all of the good options we have. Dave

In other audio news

[coolmacdude]

Apple has resleased their own sound editing app, Soundtrack. This was previously available as part of Final Cut Pro, and is now a standalone app for $299.

This American Life

[Triv]

How bout you look into getting a subscription to This American Life at audible so that the artists get a little extra something for their work if you really want to support them.

Triv

Griffin

[martingunnarsson]

Griffin technology really make sexy things! I just got a PowerMate (USB volume knob that can be programmed to execute any key combination in any program) and I just love it! Yum!

Re:Griffin

[commodoresloat]

Just don't get the iTrip unless you live someplace where no radio stations exist.

Karma whore!!

[martingunnarsson]

Direct link to RadioSHARK.

More on Audio Hijack

[nicky_d]

I'm a big fan of Audio Hijack - the first piece of shareware I ever found irreplacable enough to purchase - so I thought I'd expand a little on the 'more capablities' comment for anyone mildly interested (but not to the point of clicking the link). AH lets you record any source with the usual encoding options, and offers you a timer utility so you can set yr Mac to kick off at 4am or 1pm or whenever you happen to be in bed, and snag that shipping forecast / radio soap / opera/ whatever. Good feature, but I've never used it, because the killer IMO is the VST / AudioUnit support - you can plought the signal through any number of plugin effects before it hits the hard drive. Pack in a free VST grain delay, pitch shifter, bitcrusher and reverb and you can turn any sound source into a live glitch-up session and get some turly incredible results for the price. Or just hijack a DVD sountrack while you watch and use AH to bump the pitch up an octave. Paid for itself the first time I did that, easily.

Re:What I want is a DVD player app that handles do

[Anonymous Coward]

What's worse than not decoding the dolby is that it won't even pass it through to your sound card - If you have something spiffy like the Revolution 7.1 and a nice DTS/DolbyDigital decoder, you will still get 2.0 sound through because Apple DVD Player will not give it the dolby or DTS feed. I suspect though that DVD Player 4 will do this.

Bob

Sweet!

[PeeweeJD]

I was just looking for an app like this a couple weeks ago.. nice to see that it's freeware to boot!

Re:What I want is a DVD player app that handles do

[Anonymous Coward]

VLC can playback DVD Dolby or DTS streams by directing the stream out to hardware that can support it. Using a USB to Optical adapter (M-Audio Sonica), I output from my TiBook to my 5.1 receiver all the time.