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

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...

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

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?

Stream Ripper

[jamienk]

http://streamripperx.sourceforge.net/

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

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?

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.

[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.)

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: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!

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.