Filed under: Audio, Software, Podcasting
Ambrosia releases WireTap Anywhere audio capture tool
In the Mac audio software market, Ambrosia's WireTap Studio made a splash last year when it launched, offering lossless capture and audio editing with a fresh interface (and competing with incumbent heavyweight Audio Hijack Pro from Rogue Amoeba). Although it aimed at being an end-to-end solution for basic podcasting and audio production needs, the limitations of the built-in editor meant that high-end and pro users still needed to export from WTS to complete a project elsewhere. Since most pros end up in another editing environment anyway, why not have the underlying capture engine from WTS available to any recording application, and turn your Mac into a virtual patch bay?
That's the concept behind Ambrosia's new pro-level (and pro-priced at $129US) capture tool, WireTap Anywhere. Rather than the two-channel recording options of WTS, with the WireTap Anywhere preference pane you can route and mix multiple audio sources and deliver them to the recording application of your choice. Want Skype, iTunes and QuickTime sources all to end up in Peak or GarageBand? WTA has your back. You can check out several demo movies at Ambrosia's site or download the 13MB demo.
I've experimented with several combinations of recording software and application audio capture tools (Soundflower, Übercaster, Call Recorder, Audacity and AHP among them) and I've yet to find the perfect setup that allows me to combine live audio chat from Skype with music or sound effects played in QuickTime or iTunes, all audible to the remote call participants while being recorded cleanly and latency-free on my end; Übercaster comes awfully close, but the current 1.5.5 version still has issues with Skype dropouts. I'm looking forward to giving WTA a test run to see if it can meet the challenge.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Fernando Lins said 10:38AM on 8-15-2008
Oh my god... that interface. What were they thinking? It looks cool and works fine, but on a Preference Pane? Really?...
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Jasenpheffer said 10:56AM on 8-15-2008
Great Ambrosia... Hate to bring this up here, but how about updating Snapz Pro X so that it doesn't have its ass handed to it by other utilities like Skitch and ScreenFlow? And while you're at it, please fix that annoying registration bug (or is it a feature?) that constantly treats me as if I were an unregistered user of Snapz Pro X with movie capture, constantly watermarking me? Long overdue.
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Menge said 11:07AM on 8-15-2008
Oh. My. God!
That is the ugliest UI I've seen on OS X. What were they thinking?
Please make it die :S
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James said 11:52AM on 8-15-2008
If you like free and don't mind ugly but functional interfaces, there's always Jack OS X.
http://www.jackosx.com/
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ZX said 12:26PM on 8-15-2008
$129.00!!!!!!! (and insainly ugly)
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George Starcher said 12:46PM on 8-15-2008
I was on the beta of this. It is a pref pane because you are meant to setup these virtual audio devices and leave them. It is not a capture application you really interact with live interaction. It blends audio sources into defined new audio virtual devices.
But it does some amazing stuff. I was able to be on ichat with a friend, he patched in his web browser with youtube for audio and his mic to ichat. He was also in the beta. I did skype, and itunes into the ichat from my end and we had a complete cross patch and could hear everything when we got the playback from the echo123 skype automated test account.
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paul said 3:25PM on 8-15-2008
I liked it better when it was just named WireTap and was free.
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