News, Reviews and more from Australia's Macintosh Authority
News, Reviews and more from Australia's Macintosh Authority
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AudioCodex 1.0 |
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| Type | Audio software |
| Rating |
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| Pros | Tight OSX integration, real time audio processing |
| Cons | Nil |
| OS X | 10.4 and up |
| Processor | Universal |
| Publisher | MachineCodex |
| Distributor | Available online |
| RRP | $29.95 US |
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Music should always be about fun and it's a word that is easily applied to this little application. Australian developer MachineCodex has been around a couple of years now with this app in various stages of beta, and version 1.0 of AudioCodex marks a milestone in the company's growth.
What can you do with it? AudioCodex is essentially an audio mashup tool with superb integration with Mac OS X's CoreAudio, iTunes and any Apple Loops you may have installed. The level of integration can't be overstated — serious work has gone into making AudioCodex a Mac experience from top to bottom. The work space is a dead ringer for the iLife applications (GarageBand in particular) with direct access to your iTunes playlists from within the application. It happily allows you to tweak any of the files in any supported formats including podcasts and movies. Audio or video can also be dragged directly into AudioCodex.
A bunch of alternate visualisers are thrown in and all can be customised — some are more than worthy of being added to iTunes' small stable of visualisers.
The audio tweaking options involve changing the pitch, time, equalisation and reverb in real time. Any AudioUnit plugins installed can be applied and punch in/punch out points set for looping.
A Watched Folders icon can be found in the media browser — in my case the default Movies folder was listed under it as well as the Apple Loops folder. Right-clicking (or control-clicking for the one-button holdouts) on Watched Folders allows you to add others.
Once you have your folders set up, creating something is as simple as selecting combinations. Select a song from your iTunes library by double-clicking on it. Choose a movie or visualiser file to accompany it if you like — whatever you create is then automatically saved to your Loops folder.
The real fun comes with the pitch and time knobs. Pitch obviously makes the music play back at a higher pitch, Time speeds up or slows down the music. What impressed me here was that the Time function affected both video and audio. I tested it on some YouTube videos I'd downloaded and the video maintained sync with the music as I shifted its speed.
Australian Macworld's buying advice. AudioCodex on its own won’t produce a finished composition but it does provide an excellent creative scratchpad. I'd even goes as far as to say you shouldn't let true productivity taint your time with AudioCodex — just enjoy it. $US29.95 (yes, you pay in greenbacks for Australian software) is a small price to pay if mashing up music and video amuses you endlessly and with the trial version you have 30 days to decide if you get your kicks long term in that way.
Here's to MachineCodex's continuing its work on what may eventually be a killer application.
Steve Jobs's announcement that the software update to the iPod touch would cost money (in our case $24.99) as opposed to the software update to the iPhone, which was free (a much more attractive price point) went over like the proverbial anodised aluminium balloon at the Expo. Where a free software update adding a few widgets, a Mail client and an improved Map application would have been a no-brainer, the question must be asked: are they worth twenty-five bucks?
Matthew JC. Powell | Jan 24, 2008
The Turbo.264 is a useful piece of kit if you find yourself regularly converting movies from one format to another. While you won't find much speed gain on newer Macs, older PowerPC machines will see a significant speed gain when converting movies. At $199 the Turbo 264 is more expensive than a software-only solution, but if you're serious about converting your videos, the cost of the unit will quickly pay for itself.
Danny Gorog | Jun 24, 2008
One of the most common accessories we all own are earphones or headphones. I've always preferred headphones - I find earphones too intrusive and uncomfortable. That's why I was interested in having a look at Klipsch's Custom-2 earphones - at $299.00 these can be considered high-end and thus I wanted to see if they could convince me to throw away my headphones. The first thing that stands out is the shape of the earphones themselves - they look more like aural probes than listening devices. The reason for that are the countoured ear gels that are designed to provide a full seal in your ear canal. Five washable ear gel sizes are provided and it's worth experimenting with the sizes until you get a true seal.
David Holloway | Jul 30, 2008
If you've dreamed of decking out your house with one of those fancy Sonos sound systems think again. With a few Apple products (iTunes, Airport Express and Apple TV), and some simple set up you'll be able to create a music, and video system, that can be listened to and watched anywhere in your home. The secret ingredient is a free app for your iPhone or iPod Touch from Apple, simply called Remote.
Danny Gorog | Aug 19, 2008
As I type these words, I am waiting for Apple's Developer Connection web site to ease up sufficiently for me to download the long-awaited Software Developer Kit for the iPhone (and iPod touch, just by the by). In a way, I hate developer-oriented announcements — "here's a really cool thing we're working on, and it's available now, and hoi polloi can have it in about six months". Actually, it's the six months I hate.
