We here at TUAW have expressed our love of VisualHub, Techspansion's great video encoding app, time and again. But what if those crazy folks at Techspansion decided to take the video part out of VisualHub? The resulting app would be very much like AudialHub, an audio converter that takes many UI and functionality cues from VisualHub.

Read on for our full review.

Update: I mistakenly quoted the special VisualHub cross-upgrade promotional price as the full price for AudialHub. This error has been corrected.

Continue reading AudialHub 1.0

Retro Thing, one of my favorite blogs, points out this clever hack. The iPod nano is great, but that screen is a little small for watching movies. How do you solve that problem? Well, if you have some time, a 35mm slider viewer, and some small speakers you can hack together a solution (as seen in the video).

The movie looks pretty good, though this solution does make the iPod just a little less portable. That's the great thing about hacks, though, they don't need to be practical to be awesome.

Continue reading Show floor video: Rogue Amoeba moves to the beat

Audacity, the free and open-source audio editor (also available for Windows and Linux) is in need of some Mac-love. Whilst Mac OS X users can get themselves either the stable v1.2.6 release or a 1.3.3 beta version, development going forward is a little uncertain at the moment. According to the Audacity forum, there are no active developers on the project with Macs, and the latest beta (v1.3.4) is not going to appear on the Mac platform until "someone [with a Mac] volunteers to compile it, and sort the remaining bugs out." Yikes!

If you're interested in working on the project, then you'll want to head over to the Audacity 'Get Involved' pages for more information on how to get your hands on the code. Even if you're not a developer, if you're able to contribute via another means (such as with documentation, testing or donations), I'm sure the Audacity team would welcome you with open arms.

With the announcement of this year's Macworld Eddy award for WireTap Studio, the Ambrosia Software audio capture/editing app ($69/$30 upgrade-crossgrade) has clearly hit the big time. Serving as the successor to WireTap Pro and a direct competitor to Rogue Amoeba's Audio Hijack Pro/Fission combination, WTS has a clear purpose and a noble goal: it wants to cure you of regret.

The design and feature suite for WTS seem to say "Give me a chance to make it easier to get this right," and that's a big plus in any field of endeavor -- it's a shame they don't make marriage counseling software. With WTS, Ambrosia prez Andrew Welch is aiming to set the standard for audio capture and lossless audio on the Mac, and while some features on the editing side may not be fully baked yet, the introductory version is an impressive piece of work. I've been using it to record the TUAW podcasts for the past couple of weeks, and in most ways it's a joy to work with (some exceptions noted below).

Continue reading TUAW review: WireTap Studio shows polish & promise

Simplify Media allows you to stream music from your home computer (or from the iTunes libraries of 30 of your close personal friends) to your iPhone or iPod touch via WiFi. Admittedly this video is pure marketing, but the concept is cool. I installed a copy of the 1.0 alpha build from Installer.app, and gave it a spin--or at least I tried. The program requires that you have a Simplify Media account so I had to step back and grab a desktop client first. Then after painfully installing the software, signing agreements and clicking "I don't have an account yet", I finally got signed up and added my music folders. The whole process took about 20 frustrating minutes but persistence paid off. I then returned to my iPhone, signed in with my new account, and although I was able to get correct listings of my music library, none of the songs actually played back--causing "Server is not responding" errors instead.

This is one of the caveat lector instances: Boy, does this tool sound like it's going to be great but at the same time it doesn't really work as well as you might hope, at least it doesn't for me right now (some commenters have had better luck, see below). Simplify Media for iPhone is an alpha release and presumably will be finalized sometime after the official iPhone SDK ships.

In the property list, I adjusted the Default -> Default value up to 0.99, up from 0.7 and found that it seemed to nicely boost my speaker volume. Is this a real fix? Or did I just psychosomatically convinced my ears that they were happier? You tell me in the comments.

As iPod touch enthusiast Marian continues working on his pre-amped dock-connector Mic for the iPod touch, my Amazon Marketplace MicroMemo (i.e. clearance and cheap) showed up this morning. I loaded the latest Voice Notes onto my iPod touch, hooked in the MicroMemo and gave it a try.

Like most recorders, the MicroMemo provides two settings: Mic and Line. I found that if I shouted into the attached microphone on the Mic setting, I could just about be barely heard on the recording. Using line-in from my Macintosh was far more successful, albeit with line distortion and clipping.

I've put my test samples over at my ftp site. The LineInput is 15 seconds of music straight from my mac, over the line connector, using the Line settings. The two voice samples are Line and Mic. The Line sample is completely inaudible. There actually is a signal on the Microphone version but it's very very low--be careful not to blast out your eardrums after adjusting your playback to hear it.

I suspect if I lower the volume from my Mac, the distortion and clipping will go away but although I tried hooking my microphone through a radio-shack amplifier, the Mic recording remained very limited.

I'm not sure why the iPod touch audio-in signal would vary all that much from, say, the iPod video. I tested the same MicroMemo with a 5th Generation iPod and it worked beautifully, with clear levels.