Posted By Paul Kafasis on May 23rd, 2023

We’ve just posted another free update to our supremely useful audio control utility SoundSource. This update brings support for the new AUSoundIsolation effect that’s part of MacOS 13 (Ventura). The Sound Isolation effect works to isolate voice from background audio, and it can now be used with any app on your Mac. Today’s SoundSource update also adds support for new AutoEq profiles in the Headphone EQ effect, and fixes a small number of bugs.

SoundSource 5.6 is a free update, available available for download right from our site. If you’re already using SoundSource, use the Check for Updates button in the Settings (née Preferences) window to get this free update.

If you aren’t using SoundSource yet, see what you’ve been missing. Visit the SoundSource page to learn more and download the free trial.

Posted By Paul Kafasis on April 13th, 2023

Since its initial release in 2018, Farrago has provided Mac users with the quickest, most reliable way of creating soundboards and playing audio clips in their productions. Today, after over two years in development, we are pleased to unveil Farrago 2.0.

With this update, we’ve taken the Mac’s best soundboard app to a whole new level. It’s packed with over 50 new features, alongside dozens of bug fixes and refinements. Download Farrago 2 now, then read on to learn more about this major upgrade.

ENHANCED PLAYBACK

Farrago is built to play audio for you, whether you need to host a podcast, provide sounds for a live event, or just drop music into a video call. With that in mind, we made several enhancements to audio playback.

Preview Your Audio

With the new Preview option, you can use a secondary audio device to test audio without sending it to your main output. Hear what you’re going to play, before you play it.

Fade Updates

Fades in Farrago have been updated to work better for you. The old per-tile fade controls have been replaced with more powerful fade options in the all-new editor (more on that below).

New Sample Sets

Farrago’s sample sets provide a great way to get started using the app. In version 2, we’ve included 20 fantastic new songs for all manner of moods, as well as an updated collection of sound effects.

Of course, you’ll eventually want to find your own custom audio to use.

Help Finding Audio

Thanks to several updates in version 2, finding audio to use with Farrago is easier than ever.

Search Freesound

To help find the perfect sound files for your use, you can now search the wonderful Freesound database from right inside Farrago. Preview the search results, then download the winners for immediate use.

GarageBand and Logic Pro Integration

If you have Apple’s GarageBand or Logic Pro installed, Farrago can also offer up Apple’s fantastic musical loops for use right inside the app.

Powerful Tile Search

As you build up your library of audio, Farrago’s powerful in-app search will help you scour your collection for the exact sound you want. Search to instantly highlight matching tiles in the current set, as welll as results from other sets.

Built-In Editing

After you bring audio into Farrago, you may wish to adjust it with the new built-in editor, available right from the Inspector. Crop sounds down to the exact audio you want, and apply fades as well.

Need more powerful editing? Be sure to check out our stand-alone audio editor, Fission. →

Supercharged Sets

Farrago’s sound sets enable you to organize audio however you like, making sets for different events, different podcasts, or even different moods. In version 2, sets have been supercharged.

Smart Sets

Use powerful rules to create dynamically updating sets. Organize based on tile titles, settings, play count, and more.

Lockable Sets

You can now lock sets to prevent accidental changes, then easily unlock when you need to make an edit. For even stronger protection in shared environments like radio stations and theaters, prevent unauthorized changes with the new password protection.

Favorites

Mark tiles as Favorites, then find them in the automatically created “Favorites” smart set. You can also access them from custom smart sets.

Stand-Alone Set Windows

Sets can now be popped opened in separate windows, for even faster access. Your keyboard shortcuts will always be applied to the front-most window.

Power User Features

Stream Deck

Get incredible control over your audio with Farrago’s new Stream Deck integration. We’ve meticulously designed dynamic controls that visualize sound playback and on-tile artwork and allow you to effortlessly switch sets and adjust other controls.

OSC Support & MIDI Improvements

The new Open Sound Control (OSC) support built into Farrago offers substantial remote control capabilities. Use it to control Farrago from an iPad or iPhone using apps like TouchOSC.

We’ve also updated our MIDI support to be more refined, with additional dedicated mappings and better support for toggle buttons.

Shortcuts and Automation

Farrago now provides a slew of integrations in the Shortcuts app (found on MacOS 12 and up). Automate your usage of Farrago, including setting volumes, fading between sounds, and controlling playback. You can also trigger any Shortcut you’ve created, right from Farrago. Trigger a Shortcut when a tile plays or stops, when a set is selected, or even on app launch.

Enhancements to the User Interface

Farrago has always been a snap to use, but version 2 brings many refinements to how the app looks and works.

• Emoji Art: Add emoji to tile faces, to locate your desired sounds in a flash.

• Audio Meters: Helpful level meters can now be found in the main window’s LCD, as well as each tile’s Inspector.

• Improved Sizing and Resizing: Tiles now grow both horizontally and vertically, for more intelligent usage of screen space. Tile controls also grow when space is available, and automatic sizing of tile titles has been made smarter. Farrago’s minimum size has also shrunk, to fit on even the smallest Mac displays.

• A Smarter Main Window: Farrago’s main window keyboard shortcut (Command-0) now works better. When the window is in the background, the shortcut pulls it forward. When it’s in the foreground, the shortcut toggles visibility.



• Full VoiceOver Support: VoiceOver users, we’re ready for you. We always strive to ensure our apps are fully accessible to users with vision impairments, and Farrago 2 is no exception.

We worked to make this our prettiest, most user-friendly version yet, and there’s lots more to enjoy in the new Farrago.

Bug Fixes, Too

Of course, a major upgrade shouldn’t just be about new features. We stamped out over a dozen bugs to make using Farrago worry-free. We also focused on optimizing the app, making common operations like switching sets and window resizing lightning-fast. We hope you won’t even notice these changes, but they make using the app feel great.

Farrago 2 Is Ready for You

For even more depth, see the “What’s New in Farrago 2” page, as well as the comprehensive list of changes in the Farrago 2.0.0 release notes. It’s a very big update!

Ready to play with Farrago? Just click to download the free trial and see how the Mac’s best soundboard app has gotten even better.

Posted By Paul Kafasis on March 24th, 2023

It may be difficult to imagine, but back at the turn of the millennium, the simple right to record audio on your computer was not well-established. Though the precedent of time shifting existed for television, space shifting was still an emerging idea. The acronym for the Recording Industry Association of America, RIAA, was something of a new four-letter word due to their hostility toward new ideas. In addition to shutting down Napster, they also attempted to squash the first hardware MP3 player.

This had an impact on our marketing for the first version of Audio Hijack. Rather than focusing on the app’s recording functionality, we highlighted use cases like adding an equalizer to movies. We knew recording was useful, but the app’s ability to apply audio effects anywhere on the Mac carried much less legal peril.

At that time, our sales were slow enough that we often skimmed incoming orders to learn about who was buying. On September 30, 2003, exactly one year after we opened our virtual doors, an order with an RIAA email address came through. That put a damper on our first anniversary celebrations, as we had full knowledge of the organization’s litigious history. We were naturally concerned that they were aware of our product. Unfortunately, there was nothing for us to do but feel uneasy and await their next move.

It never came. We never heard a word from the RIAA, nor their lawyers. As time passed without any trouble, we eventually came to assume that they recognized our tool’s many legitimate fair uses. We continued development of Audio Hijack, leaning in to its audio recording abilities. That focus led to it being a premier solution for podcasters, both then and now.

Earlier this month, however, we heard a chilling story. It comes from the Podfather himself, Adam Curry, who was instrumental in helping podcasts take off in the mid-2000s. He’s also a long-time Audio Hijack user and supporter, one who provided us with many helpful suggestions in the early years. Recently, Adam gave an interview detailing his efforts to modernize the podcasting format. Therein, he told a story about the origins of podcasts in iTunes, and a conversation he had with Steve Jobs circa 2005:

And in that very meeting, Steve asked: “How do you do your recording?”. We didn’t really have any tools to record, there was not much going on at the time. But the Mac had an application called Audio Hijack Pro, and it was great because we could create audio chains with compressors, and replicate a bit of studio work.

Eddy Cue said: “The RIAA wants us to disable Audio Hijack Pro, because with it you could record any sound off of your Mac, any song, anything”. Steve then turned to me and said: “Do you need this to create these podcasts?”. I said: “Currently, yes!”. So Steve Jobs told them to get lost, and I thought: “Hey man, thanks, Steve’s on my side. That’s cool.”.

Even 18 years on, I find this story rather terrifying. If not for an offhand conversation in which we had no involvement, things could have turned out very differently for our company.

Posted By Neale Van Fleet on March 16th, 2023

As part of the unveiling of our Historic Screenshot Archive, I made some fun images to post to our social media accounts. Making those images was tricky, because interfaces were much smaller in the pre-Retina era. Here is how big a screenshot and app icon from 2002 displays on a Retina screen of today:

Screen resolution has increased so much that a once full-sized app window is tiny on modern displays.

The above screenshot of Audio Hijack’s main window, at a bit over 400 pixels wide, is smaller than even app icons of today, which can be as large as 1024 pixels wide.

I needed to scale the screenshot up by many hundreds of percent to be a useful size for a social media post. Enlarging with interpolation, however, turned the pixels into an ugly blur:

Enlarged with Lanczos interpolation, usually great for photos, this screenshot is too blurry.

So instead, I did a two-step dance. First, I exported the screenshot enlarged to 1000% using blocky nearest-neighbour interpolation. Next, I dropped that in my design app and resized it down to the size I needed:

This is more like it!

To be clear, we only ran this process on the social media images, like this one:

The social image for Audio Hijack. The effect is hard to notice at this size, but at some of the larger sizes it makes a big difference.

The screenshots you’ll find in the actual archive are unmodified. But thanks to this little trick, I could display old screenshots in all their pixely glory, even on Retina screens.

Posted By Paul Kafasis on March 3rd, 2023

20 years ago today, on March 3, 2003, Rogue Amoeba released Audio Hijack Pro 1.0. This was a crucial event in the company’s history, as sales grew substantially, taking Rogue Amoeba from a hobby to a viable business.

On this anniversary, it seems fitting for us to unveil something else special: the Rogue Amoeba Historic Screenshot Archive. It’s an in-depth collection of images and information about key versions from our 20+ years in business, and we think it’s well worth a look.

Read on for more details, or just click above to enter the archive.

Background

For many years, noted Mac collector Stephen Hackett has done wonderful work with the MacOS Screenshot Library. The library offers screenshots of the Mac’s operating system dating back to the Mac OS X Public Beta in 2000, and we’re such fans that Rogue Amoeba has sponsored it for several years now. It‘s often helpful as a reference, but it’s also simply enjoyable to look back at the way things once were.

Amazingly, Rogue Amoeba’s own story dates back nearly as far as Mac OS X’s. We opened our virtual doors in 2002, and since then, we’ve shipped nearly 1,000 different versions across our product lineup. Given that amount of history, we thought it would be both useful and fun to document our own products.

Late last year, we asked Stephen if he’d help us spin up our own archive. He was up for the challenge, so we provided him with a pile of important releases, and he set to work documenting them with his array of old Macs. When Stephen was done, he provided us with a large collection of screenshots, sorted by product and version.

Ancient, pinstriped screenshots of Airfoil 1 and Audio Hijack 1

Our team then curated these images and built a way to show them off. We created galleries for each product and dug up details and stories about each individual update. It was a lot of work, but the end result feels weighty, a worthwhile repository of much of our company’s history.

Come On In

Now, the full archive is ready for viewing. There’s a whole lot of fun history to read about and of course fascinating images to see. Grab some crudités and a beverage, then step inside:

Visit the Archive →

We hope you enjoy seeing the evolution of our products over two decades and counting. We plan to keep the archive updated with future versions, so don’t hesitate to share your feedback.