Macworld | Mac Gems

AudialHub 1.07

Posted by Dan Frakes on

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Editor’s note: As we noted last week, our Summer of Mac Gems has officially ended. We’re now back to our usual two-Gems-a-week schedule

You can use iTunes to convert audio files from one format to another, but it's a bit of a hassle and the number of supported formats—for both input files and output—is limited. Ah, if only there was an audio version of the excellent VisualHub () video-conversion software, right? As it turns out, the folks who brought us VisualHub, Techspansion, have applied their considerable talents to the field of audio. The result is AudialHub, a similarly-easy utility for converting audio files.

To convert files using AudialHub, you just drag the files into the program’s window, choose the output format, and click on Start. Over 20 input formats are supported, and output formats include AAC, AIFF, Apple Lossless, FLAC, MP3, Ogg Vorbis, WAV, WMA, and 3G. (A unique feature is that AudialHub can also extract and convert the audio track[s] of many video files.) For lossy output formats, you can choose the audio quality of the resulting file; a useful Preview palette lets you hear, in real time, how your settings affect the resulting audio quality. The conversion process is surprisingly fast, and if you’ve got a multi-core Mac, AudialHub can process multiple files simultaneously.

Wrapping up the Summer of Mac Gems ’08

Posted by Roman Loyola on

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With our review of Simple Comic 1.6.1, our Summer of Mac Gems series ends. It started back in June with a review of Lingon and ended 42 programs later. If you're interested in the other programs reviewed during the Summer of Mac Gems, check out our Mac Gems homepage. You can also see a complete listing of these Gems in the September 2008 issue of Macworld.

Our regular, twice-a-week Mac Gems column will resume next week. Until then, here are three programs you can try for yourself. They're what we call Promising Prospects, software that's not yet final, but available to the general public. Since they're not finalized, use them at your own risk—and be sure to give the developer feedback if you do encounter a bug.

ChocoFlop This image editor uses Apple's CoreImage to display graphics on your screen; the graphic speed will depend on your Mac's graphics card. You can see previews of your changes and filters in real-time.

Simple Comic 1.6.1

Posted by Jason Snell on

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Editor’s note: The following review is part of Macworld’s Summer of Mac Gems series. Each business day until the middle of August 2008, the Macworld staff will use the Mac Gems blog to briefly cover a favorite free or low-cost program. Visit the Mac Gems homepage for a list of past Mac Gems.

I’m a fan of Bitcartel’s ComicBookLover (), which provides an iTunes library-style approach to your digital comics collection. But sometimes all you want to do is read a comic book. And that's the beauty of Simple Comic , which does pretty much what the name says: gives you a fast, simple interface for reading comic books saved in PDF, CBR, and CBZ formats.

SimpleComic.

Even better, it comes with a Quick Look plug-in, so Leopard users can get quick access to comics right from the Finder. Now if only the major comic companies would get with the program and offer more comics in downloadable form.

Black Ink 1.1.2

Posted by Jonathan Seff on

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Editor’s note: The following review is part of Macworld’s Summer of Mac Gems series. Each business day until the middle of August 2008, the Macworld staff will use the Mac Gems blog to briefly cover a favorite free or low-cost program. Visit the Mac Gems homepage for a list of past Mac Gems.

If you’re a fan of crossword puzzles, like I am, then you should definitely consider adding Red Sweater Software’s Black Ink to your software arsenal.

The Mac-only program lets you solve crossword puzzles on your computer and allows you to check your answers at any time (as long as the puzzle has an unlocked answer key).

TypeCast 1.0b

Posted by Jason Snell on

6 comments

Editor’s note: The following review is part of Macworld’s Summer of Mac Gems series. Each business day until the middle of August 2008, the Macworld staff will use the Mac Gems blog to briefly cover a favorite free or low-cost program. Visit the Mac Gems homepage for a list of past Mac Gems.

iTunes' podcast support is great. The program always remembers where you pause podcast installments, and iPhone users can sync podcasts on a computer other than the one they use for music and video syncing.

So what if you've got a file you wish were in a podcast—say, an interview downloaded from the Web—but isn't? Red Sweater Software’s TypeCast solves this problem by creating a phony podcast in iTunes and filling it with whatever files you drag into its window.

TubeTV 1.0

Posted by Roman Loyola on

14 comments

Editor’s note: The following review is part of Macworld’s Summer of Mac Gems series. Each business day until the middle of August 2008, the Macworld staff will use the Mac Gems blog to briefly cover a favorite free or low-cost program. Visit the Mac Gems homepage for a list of past Mac Gems.

Sure, the iPhone and the Apple TV provide access to YouTube videos, but this access is not the same as downloading a YouTube video to your hard drive. For that, you can use TubeTV 1.0, a straightforward, basic YouTube video downloader.

Just enter the URL of the YouTube video into TubeTV (or use the Search field) and click on the "Download movie" button, and TubeTV saves the video to your Mac.

PodWorks 2.9.3

Posted by Christopher Breen on

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As much as we love our Macs, they’re occasionally imperfect devices—they can crash, and if we, in our particularly imperfect way, neglect to back up our data, that data may then be vaporized. Data loss is particularly painful when that data is your iTunes library.

Thankfully, a copy of that library can often be found in your pocket, housed within your iPod or iPhone. PodWorks’ job is to copy it from your pocket to the inside of your now trouble-free Mac.

PodWorks 2.9.3.

Like other utilities, it copies all your media from your iPod via the iPod’s data cable. Unlike some other utilities, it also copies your playlists, ratings, and play counts. Plus, it works with the iPhone and iPod touch and can run directly from a click-wheel iPod

Join Together 5.2

Posted by Christopher Breen on

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Editor’s note: The following review is part of Macworld’s Summer of Mac Gems series. Each business day until the middle of August 2008, the Macworld staff will use the Mac Gems blog to briefly cover a favorite free or low-cost program. Visit the Mac Gems homepage for a list of past Mac Gems.

iTunes lets you rip multiple tracks from an audio CD as a single track. But what do you use if you want to combine tracks that have already been ripped? Why, Join Together 5.2.1, of course.

This AppleScript Studio application can take tracks you’ve imported from a playlist in your iTunes library and, as the name suggests, join them into a single AAC-encoded file.

Transmission 1.22

Posted by Dan Moren on

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Editor’s note: The following review is part of Macworld’s Summer of Mac Gems series. Each business day until the middle of August 2008, the Macworld staff will use the Mac Gems blog to briefly cover a favorite free or low-cost program. Visit the Mac Gems homepage for a list of past Mac Gems.

BitTorrent has become the peer-to-peer protocol of choice for transferring large files quickly. There are plenty of clients for OS X, but Transmission Project’s Transmission 1.22 has a lot of things going for it: it's fast, it's extremely lightweight, and-even though it's available for a variety of platforms-it behaves just as you'd expect a Mac program to.

Don't be fooled by its simple, intuitive interface: it has plenty of power. You can set up Transmission to watch a particular folder for torrent files and begin downloads automatically, set upload and download speed restrictions globally or for individual files, and even configure the program to prefer encrypted peers.

TransformMovie 1.1

Posted by Roman Loyola on

4 comments

Editor’s note: The following review is part of Macworld’s Summer of Mac Gems series. Each business day until the middle of August 2008, the Macworld staff will use the Mac Gems blog to briefly cover a favorite free or low-cost program. Visit the Mac Gems homepage for a list of past Mac Gems.

Ever record a video on your point-and-shoot camera while holding the camera in portrait mode? Your recorded videos are still in landscape mode, so your videos are tilted sideways.

To rotate your videos to the proper position, you could pay $30 for QuickTime Pro—but you should also consider TransformMovie 1.1. Unlike QuickTime Pro, TransformMovie lets you rotate movies from 1 to 360 degrees; rotating in anything other than 90-degree increments results in a black frame around your movie, which can be an artsy effect.