Posted By Paul Kafasis on April 11th, 2013

First up, we’ve got a small but important update to Audio Hijack Pro today, which fixes a handful of small bugs. That update is available now from the Audio Hijack Pro page, and it’s free for all current Audio Hijack Pro users of course. Get it by downloading from our site, or just select “Check for Update” in the Audio Hijack Pro menu inside the app.

With this update, we also realized that Audio Hijack Pro had just celebrated its tenth birthday. First released on March 3rd, 2003, the app remains incredibly popular, gaining thousands of new users each year. Today’s release marks the 59th release of Audio Hijack Pro, and it’s still going strong. Given the many changes over the years, it’s useful to give a quick overview on where things stand with the app.

Realtime Audio Capture

Audio Hijack Pro’s most basic functionality is its ability to capture audio coming from other applications (as well as audio devices, of course). Audio Hijack Pro has always been able to capture audio on a per-application level. This is definitely the preferred way to capture audio, as it means beeps and blips from other applications won’t ruin a recording. Just select your desired source application and click Record, and Audio Hijack Pro will capture and record that app’s audio.

Alternatively, using the System Audio source, you can capture all audio currently playing on your Mac. Recording from System Audio requires the installation of the Instant On extra, but once you’ve got that installed, you’ll be able to grab everything into one file.

Audio Hijack Pro can start capturing audio from other applications and devices right out of the box, with no installer required. It simply needs to launch the application from which you wish to capture audio (or re-launch it, if it’s already open). This same technology is used in our simplified recorder Piezo, which is sold via the Mac App Store.

For additional functionality, the application will offer to install our Instant On extra. This extra works to improve audio capture for Audio Hijack Pro, as well as Airfoil and Nicecast, and it’s in use on tens of thousands of Macs around the world. With Instant On installed, Audio Hijack Pro can capture audio from running applications without needing to relaunch them (very handy!). Instant On also makes it possible to record System Audio, as mentioned above.

Worth mentioning, Instant On no longer uses the long-deprecated Application Enhancer (APE) framework. In order to make grabbing audio as robust as possible, we’ve developed our own dedicated audio capture system in-house, one which relies on no private system APIs.

OS Support

The current version of Audio Hijack Pro supports Mac OS X 10.6 – Mac OS X 10.8 (all the way up to the current 10.8.3, of course). We also provide Legacy versions of our software, for users on older OSes. We’re committed to keeping our software working for you even as Apple releases new updates. We strive to have support for new versions of Mac OS X as soon as humanly possible.

Future Plans

How about the future? Over Audio Hijack Pro’s dozens of releases, we’ve added great new features and functionality. However, it’s been some time since the app has had a truly major new version. As you’ve likely seen, our audio editor Fission hit version 2 last year, followed by a substantial version 2.1 released a couple months later.

The recent updates to Fission are great, but they’re also making it clear that Audio Hijack Pro should get some love as well. Fear not, as we’ve got a lot of plans for the future of Audio Hijack Pro and audio recording on the Mac. We’ve been hard at work implementing these ideas, and should have exciting Audio Hijack Pro-related news to share in the near future.

More to Come

Closing

For now though, just be sure to grab the latest update right from our site and enjoy! Keep your eyes on this site, as well as our Twitter feed, for more news soon.