MacRumors has been given the opportunity to provide an exclusive preview of an unreleased and unannounced application from Ambrosia Software called WireTap Studio, due for first release later this month.
While WireTap Studio shares a name with WireTap Pro, it is an entirely new application with a broader range and appeal. The major feature of the original WireTap Pro application was the ability to selectively record audio from any Mac application and save it to a variety of formats. Uses ranged from recording Internet radio to ripping audio from DVDs. WireTap Studio promises to provide a more complete solution with tools to record, edit and manage your audio. A few standout features should make it particularly compelling for both amateurs and professionals who distribute audio over the Internet.
As a preview, we are simply touching on the major features of the application, and this shouldn't be seen as a review. I do think that the most compelling feature is the patent pending LivePreview technology, so if you read nothing else you should at least watch the video below. Beyond that, lossless editing and lossless format selection are also very attractive features.The Controller
The WireTap Studio Controller provides you with an 'always on top' window that gives you access to many of the features of the application in a compact interface:
Controller
As you can see, two different sources can be selected. Either source can be an active application or an audio input device: microphone, iSight, Line In, etc. For example, podcasters can record from their microphone as well as a second application such as iTunes or Skype. This means you can perform over-the-Internet audio interviews or lay down a background track to your voice. Most useful, perhaps, is that each track can later be normalized independently, allowing you to calibrate the volumes to match:
Normalize volume on two different tracks
Audio can of course be recorded and exported in a variety of formats and qualities, including MP3, AAC, AIFC, AIFF, Apple Lossless and WAVE formats. You can choose from presets or specify exact parameters:
Preset formats
The Library
Recordings are organized in an iTunes-like library view, which can be organized into folders and searched by keywords/tags. Audio recordings can be distributed conveniently, simply by dragging the title to the appropriate icon on the bottom 'Send to' toolbar. Ambrosia tells us that they will be including 'iPhone' as an export option before the application is released.
Library view
LivePreview
Now, on to the good stuff. One challenge for audio distribution on the Internet is finding the sweet spot between file size and audio quality. To address this, WireTap Studio provides a new feature called LivePreview. LivePreview gives you realtime conversion of the source audio into any supported format. This allows you to preview encoding quality on the fly.
Describing LivePreview doesn't quite capture the ease and utility of the feature, so I encourage you to watch this QuickTime movie of LivePreview in action:
Audio starts about 25 seconds into the video. The audio source is a CD.
Lossless Recording and Editing
While changing audio encoding on the fly is nice, getting to change your mind is even better. Once audio has been recorded, the audio encoding decision that you make is not set in stone.
Under the hood, WireTap Studio records everything in a full-quality lossless format. For instance, if you use WireTap Studio to record off of a CD into a 64kbps MP3 file, you can later (days, weeks, etc...) change the format to 128kbps (or 320kbps) MP3 and see the expected gain in quality. The full uncompressed audio remains available to the software 'behind the scenes' to allow format conversions to work as expected.
Another related feature is lossless editing. No matter how many changes you've made to the recording, you can always go back to the original recording (at the highest quality). This feature is similar to how Apple's iPhoto and Aperture applications work on digital photos, keeping the originals intact while you apply edits over time.
Other Features
- Timed recordings with Pre-recording actions and Post-recording actions
- Scheduled recordings with auto wake from sleep and auto power on for the computer
- Support for Audio Unit plug-ins
- Automatically Crop Leading and Trailing Silence
- Mark and Crop at Silence
WireTap Studio will be offered as shareware and is expected to be released later this month with upgrade options for existing WireTap Pro customers.
While WireTap Studio shares a name with WireTap Pro, it is an entirely new application with a broader range and appeal. The major feature of the original WireTap Pro application was the ability to selectively record audio from any Mac application and save it to a variety of formats. Uses ranged from recording Internet radio to ripping audio from DVDs. WireTap Studio promises to provide a more complete solution with tools to record, edit and manage your audio. A few standout features should make it particularly compelling for both amateurs and professionals who distribute audio over the Internet.
As a preview, we are simply touching on the major features of the application, and this shouldn't be seen as a review. I do think that the most compelling feature is the patent pending LivePreview technology, so if you read nothing else you should at least watch the video below. Beyond that, lossless editing and lossless format selection are also very attractive features.The Controller
The WireTap Studio Controller provides you with an 'always on top' window that gives you access to many of the features of the application in a compact interface:
Controller
As you can see, two different sources can be selected. Either source can be an active application or an audio input device: microphone, iSight, Line In, etc. For example, podcasters can record from their microphone as well as a second application such as iTunes or Skype. This means you can perform over-the-Internet audio interviews or lay down a background track to your voice. Most useful, perhaps, is that each track can later be normalized independently, allowing you to calibrate the volumes to match:
Normalize volume on two different tracks
Audio can of course be recorded and exported in a variety of formats and qualities, including MP3, AAC, AIFC, AIFF, Apple Lossless and WAVE formats. You can choose from presets or specify exact parameters:
Preset formats
The Library
Recordings are organized in an iTunes-like library view, which can be organized into folders and searched by keywords/tags. Audio recordings can be distributed conveniently, simply by dragging the title to the appropriate icon on the bottom 'Send to' toolbar. Ambrosia tells us that they will be including 'iPhone' as an export option before the application is released.
Library view
LivePreview
Now, on to the good stuff. One challenge for audio distribution on the Internet is finding the sweet spot between file size and audio quality. To address this, WireTap Studio provides a new feature called LivePreview. LivePreview gives you realtime conversion of the source audio into any supported format. This allows you to preview encoding quality on the fly.
Describing LivePreview doesn't quite capture the ease and utility of the feature, so I encourage you to watch this QuickTime movie of LivePreview in action:
Lossless Recording and Editing
While changing audio encoding on the fly is nice, getting to change your mind is even better. Once audio has been recorded, the audio encoding decision that you make is not set in stone.
Under the hood, WireTap Studio records everything in a full-quality lossless format. For instance, if you use WireTap Studio to record off of a CD into a 64kbps MP3 file, you can later (days, weeks, etc...) change the format to 128kbps (or 320kbps) MP3 and see the expected gain in quality. The full uncompressed audio remains available to the software 'behind the scenes' to allow format conversions to work as expected.
Another related feature is lossless editing. No matter how many changes you've made to the recording, you can always go back to the original recording (at the highest quality). This feature is similar to how Apple's iPhoto and Aperture applications work on digital photos, keeping the originals intact while you apply edits over time.
Other Features
- Timed recordings with Pre-recording actions and Post-recording actions
- Scheduled recordings with auto wake from sleep and auto power on for the computer
- Support for Audio Unit plug-ins
- Automatically Crop Leading and Trailing Silence
- Mark and Crop at Silence
WireTap Studio will be offered as shareware and is expected to be released later this month with upgrade options for existing WireTap Pro customers.
Recording and editing audio on your Mac just got a lot easier with Ambrosia Software's official release of WireTap Studio, the next evolutionary step in the company's WireTap line of products. Sporting an extremely sophisticated tagline of 'I'd tap that,' WireTap Studio directly competes with the likes of Audio Hijack Pro in that it allows you to record from any hardware input or software audio passing through your Mac. WireTap Studio stands out, however, with a number of impressive new features, beginning with its completely lossless workflow.
![Wiretap Studio For Mac Wiretap Studio For Mac](http://www.wirerealm.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/apple-logic-pro-digital-audio-workstation.png)
After recording, edit your clips with WireTap Studio's revolutionary. (27023 kb) Get WireTap Studio ver 3.2.2 BZ04ll 1.2.3 Mac Pro.
From the ground up, WireTap Studio is designed to record your projects in a lossless format, and then edit and export to various compression formats while maintaining the master lossless copy in a library. You can even return to a project at a later date and change the edits you made; WireTap Studio can save all that work so you have the freedom to second guess yourself as often as you like. Things get more interesting when you add WireTap Studio's LivePreview feature into the mix.
At any point during editing or simply previewing a source, you can apply a compression preview to hear what your project will sound like before you ever export or even hit record. No rendering, no countless export-then-wait operations to try out various compression levels and formats. It's like checking the Preview option on a Photoshop filter to get an instant look at what your adjustments will look like.
Only this is with audio... and you don't have to pay $600.
But wait, there's more: WireTap Studio is great for podcasting too, as it not only allows you to record Skype and iChat conversations, but it records you and your participants on separate tracks. Perfect for cleaning up those inevitable quality issues that seem to appear just when you don't need them. Even timed recording is here, with the ability to schedule a recording and specify which app's audio gets saved.
WireTap Studio has strong support for exporting and uploading your finished product to a server, iDisk, via Bluetooth, e-mail and more. This is where one of the few drawbacks appears, though: support for uploading to a server doesn't seem quite as robust as it should. While WireTap Studio is obviously a recording and editing app first and an FTP utility second, we would like to have seen a little better support for things like exporting to multiple servers.
That said, WireTap Studio feels like a great 1.0 product so far. There's a lot of clever polish all over, from the ability to tag MP3 and MP4 files in the editor window, an auto-fade option when cropping audio, and a preference for waking your Mac to catch a scheduled recording. To help get users off the ground, Ambrosia posted a few video tutorials, and a demo is of course available. A full license runs for $69, though for a limited time customers can upgrade from Ambrosia's own WireTap Pro or Rogue Amoeba's Audio Hijack Pro or Fission products for just $30.