The free version of Audio Hijack adds noise to recordings more than ten minutes long, but if that becomes an issue, you can upgrade to the full Audio Hijack Pro for $49. It also supports Audio Units plugins alongside its own built-in effects.įor the simple business of recording, say, the output of your Mac’s DVD player, it’s actually rather overpowered, but its deeper functions can be easily ignored by those who don’t need them.
The latest update to Rogue Amoeba’s venerable app introduced an entirely redone interface, a powerful new modular workflow, task-orientated presets, FLAC recording, multiple simultaneous recorders per session and more.
Use it to capture movie dialogue, YouTube video soundtracks, internet radio streams, soft synth jam sessions and anything else that might prove useful in your productions. Rogue Amoeba Audio Hijack 3Īn absolute must-have for any Mac-based samplist, Audio Hijack makes capturing any audio running on the host machine a snap. None of our baker's dozen is particularly expensive - indeed, quite a few of them are free, or have a sibling free version - and while we doubt you'll need anywhere near all of them, we'd put money on there being at least one application or plugin here that could find a place in your studio and workflow. Here, you'll find tools to help with signal routing and analysis, recording your computer's system audio, keeping your DJ mixes in key, simulating speakers in headphones and more. So, to right that wrong, we've put together a round-up of what we consider to be 13 of the most essential of them. However, there's a whole world of less glamorous but equally important music production utilities and accessories out there that you may be blissfully unaware of.
(Image credit: Bettmann/CORBIS) Super-useful utilitiesĪs a computer musician you probably spend most if not all of your software budget on virtual instruments, effects plugins, DAWs, soundware and all those other fundamental things that it would be clearly impossible to make music without.