If you want some cool Mac music production utilities then Ronan Macdonald has done the hard work for you and made a pick of his essential 5!
DAWs and plugins are the first things that come to mind when deciding where in your production setup to invest your hard-earned cash, but there are numerous less-considered utility applications out there that, while perhaps less glamorous, can often prove more useful. This week and next, we’re going to reveal the best of them – first up, Mac, followed next week by our five cross-platform favourites.
Rogue Amoeba Audio Hijack
“If you can hear it, you can record it” – the confident claim at the top of the marketing for Rogue Amoeba’s must-have utility says it all. Audio Hijack enables you to record any audio signal running through your Mac, no matter where it originates or where it’s going, in all the main compressed and uncompressed formats. Accepting input directly from discrete applications rather than your audio interface, it’s endlessly useful for sampling YouTube videos and other web-based sources, capturing jam sessions from a DAW and/or standalone virtual instrument, Shoutcast streaming, and so on. The intuitive interface makes it easy to set up routing schemes, and a variety of built-in effects and clean-up processors, plus Audio Units effects support, are on hand when you want to to save on a trip to your audio editor.
You might not even need to shell out for the full application, either, as the demo permits recordings of up to ten minutes to be made, after which noise is introduced to the signal.
Iced Audio AudioFinder
If your sample library is as big and out of control as ours, AudioFinder might just change your life. In simple terms, it’s an audio file librarian, cataloguing every sample and clip on your hard drive, and bringing them all together in a lightning-fast searchable database with editable metadata, a waveform display, bookmarking and macOS Finder integration, for browsing and (keyboard-pitched) auditioning. However, it’s what you can do with your samples within AudioFinder that sets it apart. As well as basic audio editing – trimming, fading, slicing, normalising, etc – there’s beat detection, pitchshifting, mirroring, micro-harmonic sound comparison, AU plugin support (for auditioning and rendering) and more.
It’s been around forever, gradually iterating towards the current version 6, and with a lifetime upgrade policy sweetening the deal, AudioFinder is a no-brainer.
Bombich Software Carbon Copy Cloner
When Apple introduced their Time Machine automatic backup system with OS X Leopard in 2007, savvy Mac musicians had already been safely duplicating their precious audio drives for half a decade using Bombich’s bullet-proof solution.
Superior to Time Machine in every way bar ease of setup, Carbon Copy Cloner allows for customisation of backup routines and folder exclusions, as well as email notifications, incremental snapshots, network backups, comprehensive task management, backup integrity checking and much more.
Crucially, beyond all that, CCC does its thing by literally mirroring the copied drive, rather than representing it as an unhelpful (and failure-prone!) bundle of packages á la Time Machine, which makes finding that single snare sample you accidentally deleted last week as easy as browsing your file system.
AudioSwift
This ingenious little menubar app presses your MacBook trackpad or Magic Trackpad into service as a mix controller and MIDI note generator for use with any DAW or standalone virtual instrument.
AudioSwift is invoked with a four-finger tap when needed, whereupon it takes over your trackpad, with key commands and the MacBook Touch Bar used to switch between its five modes: Mixer, Trigger, Scale, XY and Slider.
The first of these sees the trackpad divided up into zones that map to your Mackie Control-compatible DAW’s mixer faders, knobs and buttons across six easily navigable pages, while the other four facilitate various forms of MIDI triggering (single notes – with MPE! – chords, drums and scales) and CC output control (XY pads and sliders).
Clearly, it’s not intended as a replacement for your Komplete Kontrol or SL MkIII, but as an on-the-go means of note entry, synth control and automation writing, AudioSwift is quite brilliant.
Rogue Amoeba Loopback
At one point, Rogue Amoeba were responsible for overseeing the ubiquitous Soundflower open source ‘virtual audio interface’, and Loopback has them taking the same core concept and making it much more accessible – albeit also much less free.
In a nutshell, Loopback lets you route audio signals between any and all hardware and software connected to and running on your Mac, thereby enabling such trickery as combining multiple signals (a USB microphone, an audio interface and a standalone soft synth, for example) into one for recording into a DAW; or capturing samples from YouTube, like Audio Hijack, but directly into any application you like.
With 64 input and output channels provided, you certainly won’t run out of virtual cabling, and if Soundflower’s bare-bones interface and involved setup procedure have always been a turn-off, Loopback offers a far more friendly and visually representative alternative.
What’s your favourite Mac audio utility? Let us know in the comments.