Mac|Life - July 2008

MUSIC, PHOTOS, AND VIDEO

Between iLife ’08, the i Tunes Store, and the Apple TV, Apple does its utmost to make sure we load up our Macs with digital media, and it does a slick job giving us a range of tools to edit that media. But as good as the iLife ’08 apps are, they have their limitations. And very few casual users need the firepower of Apple’s higher-end media apps, such as Final Cut Studio

and A perture. When it comes to editing and managing media on your Mac, you have a lot of excellent third-party options, many of which have refreshingly short learning curves—with affordable price tags to match.

13. ACORN

We love the power of Photoshop CS3, but Adobe’s high-priced flagship
image editor is not for everyone. Fortunately, several simpler photo
e ditorshaveemergedinrecentyearsto

Acorn a ppealtothecost-conscioushobbyist c rowd. Chiefamongthemis Acorn, a c onsumer-levelappthatblendsimmediately into the Mac OS thanks to its thoughtful design. Its editing tools are a huge step up from those included in iPhoto 08, including

support for layers and levels, an extensive selection of filters, Web
optimization settings, and integration with Flickr’s desktop uploader.
Acorn’s tool selection seems guaranteed to satisfy the ever-growing
army of point-and-shoot digital

photographers, although it’s probably too lightweight for the DSLR crowd.

Acorn offers a sophisticated selection of filters, Unsharp Mask chief among them.

Connect360 www.nullriver .com/products/ connect360 Cost: $20 Developer: Nullriver Software Requirements: OS 10. 3. 9

14. CONNECT360

Until we make the switch once and for all to an Apple TV for all of our media streaming, we’ll stream movies, music, and photos to our television through our XBox 360 using Connect360. Once installed, Connect360 allows your Mac to appear within the XBox

360’s Dashboard, making it possible to browse and play the media files inside your Music and Movie folders via the Xbox 360. The app’s biggest limitation is its lack of support for FairPlay-protected files purchased through the i Tunes Music Store, but given Apple’s lock on FairPlay, that’s hardly the developer’s fault. Besides, Connect360 supports a wide array of other formats, including H.264, WMV,

and DivX video, as well as MP3,

Apple Lossless, and unprotected AAC audio.

Don’t hate us because we love our XBox 360. Connect360 enables our Mac to communicate with Microsoft’s game console so we can stream media files to our TV.

15. AUDACITY

While we prefer GarageBand for no-nonsense recording and editing, the free and open-source Audacity is hard to beat for fixing poor recordings. Its hefty filter menu offers powerful, flexible tools for

r emoving background noise, making

^Audacityl ow-volume recordings audible, and audacity. sourceforge. c ompressing differences in volume. And net/

_Cost: _FreeAudacity imports and exports a range of ^Developer: ^Open-formats with greater ease and grace than source community

Requirements: OS X GarageBand, which seems to begrudge the
fact that you might want to use another
audio editor. Files exported to the high-

quality AIFF format with Audacity are easily imported back into GarageBand. The zoom control on Audacity’s waveform editor can make it a much better choice than GarageBand for editing files that require a lot of fine cutting. On the Mac desktop, Audacity’s big failing is the design of its user interface—it’s obviously a port of a Windows program, and it doesn’t integrate very well with OS X. Aesthetics aside, though, its utility as an audio Swiss Army knife is vastly underrated on the Mac.

Audacity’s waveform editor and filters offer a level of fine-tuning that is unavailable in GarageBand.

16. VLC _VLCQuick Time’s hardiness and system integration makes it the go-to video player on the Mac. Still, there are video formats that Quick Time doesn’t support. For those files, we turn to VLC, a free, open-source application ported to the Mac. VLC’s specialty is playing files located elsewhere on a network, though it’s equally happy to play files from a local machine. Supported video codecs include AVI, MP4, FLV, WMV, MOV, and far too many others to name.