Audio Geek Zine

I haven’t been a Mac user for long so I asked a simple question on Twitter (@theaudiogeek), “What’s your favorite FREE Mac apps and utilities?” I got a ton of answers and after a few weeks of trying them out, here’s what I find I use on a daily basis, in no particular order.

• Firefox - Doesn’t need much explanation does it? The best browser. There is a small catch though, the default theme on the mac doesn’t do bookmark icons so I needed to track down a theme that does, I went with Camifox.
• xACT – I use this to encode and decode audio files to various formats including FLAC
• Songbird - I personally hate iTunes, Songbird is made by Mozilla and has most of the features of Firefox included. A major in my like of Songbird and dislike of iTunes is integrated FLAC support. 90% of my music library is FLAC files. I now use Cog (see below)
• Adium – A great instant messenger App, for those that use such things, very customizable, I suggest getting Growl notifier too.
• AppTrap – Uninstalling programs on OSX is pretty straightforward, just drop it in the trash. However that doesn’t remove all the additional associated system files. Enter AppTrap which simply asks if you want to keep the system files or delete them too whenever you drop a program in the trash.
• The Unarchiver – Handles more compressed archive formats than OSX on it’s own, such as RAR and 7-Zip.
• SimplyRAR – I use this to make RAR archives, like zip but with much better compression options.
• Stickies – Post it notes on your virtual desktop, pretty helpful, included with OSX.
• Grab – This one is already included in OSX, but you may not have noticed it (in the utilities folder). Should handle all your screenshot needs, besides video. Try Skitch instead.
• Picasa – I got used to using Picasa on my PC because its an awesome photo organizing program. Sure I could just use iPhoto, but I avoid “lowercase i” prefixes whenever possible.
• Xee -  Admit it, Preview sucks, try Xee a lightweight and fast image viewer.
• Open Office – Why pay for an office suite when this free one works great?
• Quicksilver – This may be a little advanced, but it’s a great tool for quick execution of a variety of things. Extremely powerful tool, if you take the time to learn it.
• Yasu – I admit I haven’t actually ran this utility yet, I have a 3 week old mac, not really necessary. BUT when I do need to do some maintenance, this is the one to use. If you haven’t thought about cleaning up your Mac recently (or ever?!) Run Yasu tonight.
• Time Machine – Another great one included with OSX. This is a simple backup program, which means you have no excuse NOT to have a backup of your system. Hourly, daily, weekly, monthly backups until your backup drive is filled, I had some issues with it interfering with Pro Tools during recording, so set it to manual and backup once a day or whenever you think of it.
• SuperDuper! – Complete system backup (including drive cloning) and recovery made simple.
• Pro Tools Prefs & Database Helper – I wish this wasn’t necessary, but Pro Tools has problems, and this helps with the most common ones.

New stuff! [added 10/18/2009]

• FreeMind – I just started using this to brainstorm topics for the blog and podcast. Really easy to use software to make you at least feel more productive.
• Skitch – Man, what a great program! Screen capture, drawing, and sharing instantly and intuitively. HIGHLY recommended. I wish I had this on my PC too.

More New stuff! [added 01/01/2010]

• Cog Audio Player I now use Cog all the time, I love that it plays all formats and is so minimal, just a list of songs with playback controls.

So that’s it, those are what I use most often. Of course if I had those all in the dock it would be ridiculous, instead I have a folder named “Most Used Apps” with aliases to some of them on the right side of the dock. As you can see I keep my dock minimal.

Don’t worry, this isn’t site isn’t going to be taken over by Mac fanaticism I just find these programs really helpful. I’ll keep this up to date adding new ones I find and crossing off the apps that fall from favor.