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Rogue Amoeba posts

Filed under: Audio, Utilities, Macintosh, Apple, Freeware

Rogue Amoeba audio freebies for your Mac

Rogue AmoebaRogue Amoeba is a very well regarded Mac developer specializing in audio software. They have some very popular commercial software to their name, like Audio Hijack Pro, Fission and AirFoil. But you may not be aware that they also offer some pretty nifty freebies. We'll focus on the audio-related ones.

SoundSource is a utility that sits in your menu bar, and allows you to arbitrarily choose which audio device to send sound to with a single click. This can obviously be helpful if you're working on a machine with more than one set of speakers installed, and removes the need to navigate to your system's Sound Preferences pane.


LineIn is a utility that will enable the soft playthru of audio from input devices. This is a feature that existed in Mac OS 9, but is not present in OS X. This means that you can plug an external audio device into your Mac's sound input, and pass through the signal to play through your Mac's audio output port. Since Rogue Amoeba's Audio Hijack application can record anything that is being played on the output port, this utility can be used to pipe external audio sources right into Audio Hijack.

Filed under: Audio, Internet, Utilities, Windows

Airfoil for Windows 2.0 released



Apple's AirPort Express is a handy little, nearly-pocketable wireless router that, amongst other neat features, allows you to wireless stream iTunes music from a Mac or Windows PC to a set of speakers, thanks to its standard headphone jack (which doubles as an optical jack as well). The only problem is: iTunes is the sole app that the AirPort Express is designed to stream audio from. Fortunately, long-time Mac OS X software company Rogue Amoeba decided this iTunes exclusivity just wasn't right, so they developed Airfoil in both Mac and Windows versions.

Airfoil is a great little utility that allows you to stream any audio from your computer to an AirPort Express, but it doesn't stop there. In fact, a fresh new version 2.0 update for the Windows version today introduces cool new features like sending audio to multiple AirPort Expresses, playing back audio locally while still streaming it and a 10-band equalizer for adjusting the audio you're streaming.

If all this has your attention, an Airfoil demo is of course available, while a license costs just $25. For existing owners, however, Airfoil 2.0 for Windows is a free upgrade.

Filed under: Design, Productivity, Adobe

Dear Adobe: What the hell happened to you?


Adobe has slowly been adding to that chip on many people's shoulders for some time now, and lately they seem to be upping their game. Certainly, comments from their CEO like "our customer is not typically price sensitive" don't help matters, but it seems that even the very software their company is so well known for is beginning to suffer from poor, nay - dreadful - design and management.

Take this rant from Gus Mueller of Flying Meat software on how much trouble it is to simply update Adobe Reader. Gus had to download a disk image containing an installer package which does nothing but download the actual installer application - ironic, especially since you would be hard pressed to find a browser these days that doesn't have its own download manager, sometimes even with bleeding-edge features like pausing and resuming downloads. But the fun doesn't stop there, as Mac developers Rogue Amoeba noted on their own blog last September: for some reason that we're sure would elude even The Oracle herself, Adobe Reader needed to launch an updater upon first run that needed to download updates for itself before checking on any updates for Adobe Reader...

Shouldn't all this software already be at their latest latest versions? Do we really need to download something that downloads something that downloads something just to check if it has to download something? Who manages this software, and what did they do with our dear friend, sensibility?

Please Adobe - this needs to stop.

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The World's Hardest Game 2.0 - Time Waster

So, just how good at time waster games are you? Think you've got the stuff? Well, The World's Hardest Game 2.0 doesn't think you do. Yes, amazingly, it's possible to have a sequel to a game called "The World's Hardest Game". It doesn't seem logically possible, since if the first one was actually the world's hardest, how could another one come along and share the moniker? It made me doubt the name in the first place. That is, until I tried the game. The mechanics of the game are very simple. You are a small red square, ...

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