out post sound blog

So, today I download a great little piece of free audio software for the Mac and decided to write a little article on other free (or cheap) pieces of software that you can find out there on the interwebulation machine.

So, let's start with xACT or OS X Audio Compression Tool. A nifty little audio file conversion program that will convert FLAC, SHN, APE, Wavpack, TTA and Apple Lossless into WAV or AIFFs in a snap. It can also help with CD extraction, Batch Renaming, FLAC Replay Gain and de-emphasis.

Basically, xACT is a front end for unix applications Shorten (3.6.1), shntool (3.0.10), monkey's audio compressor (3.99), flac (1.2.1), wavpack (4.60.1), TTA (3.4.1) and cdda2wav 3.0 (with paranoia support).

Download xACT for Mac here

Another useful little utility is called BWAV Reader from Quseosoft. This program lets you inspect inside you Broadcast WAV files and and read the metadata. The company also offers other utilities that allow you to alter that data in the form of BWAV Writer, and BWAV Lister allows you to make lists of Broadcast WAV files based on the metadata. These last three are shareware but BWAV Reader is free.

Download BWAV Reader here

Finally, for this post at least there is AudioLeak from Channel D software. AudioLeak is a LEQ audio equivalent level analyser plus much more. Some of it's options include:

It's a great program for getting you out of a tight spot when you need to analyse a massive file very quickly, and with a bit of jiggery pokery, you can use it to estimate LEQ(M) as well.

Download Audio Leak here