Sunday, January 25, 2015

Audio Hijack 3

Paul Kafasis:

We’ve been developing products under the Audio Hijack name since 2002, when Mac OS X 10.1 was cutting-edge! Over the years, users have found incredible ways to adapt Audio Hijack for their needs, leading us to make many updates and improvements. Eventually, however, these changes caused Audio Hijack to outgrow our original designs. We’ve incorporated over a decade’s worth of experience and feedback into Audio Hijack 3 to improve the process of recording and enhancing audio. Every aspect of our previous Audio Hijack products has been thoughtfully examined and considered, with enhancements made across the board.

The new interface looks really neat.

Update (2015-02-06): Christa Mrgan:

Having used the node-based applications Quartz Composer and Shake, I imagined Audio Hijack users dealing with a hairy web of randomly-placed, text-heavy rectangles connected by fiddly, intersecting lines and a general sense of chaos.

Even if this style of interface made the application more flexible and powerful, this was not my idea of an improvement. Fortunately for all involved, my protests were ignored. “We’re doing nodes,” Paul said. “We’ll just have to make nodes easier to use.”

And so we worked our way through many different designs. We eventually settled on four basic types of blocks which would automatically snap together when dragged to a grid. The blocks themselves went through many iterations, with various methods for connecting and showing the flow of audio. We finally arrived at the idea of blocks auto-connecting via “pipes”, which would then show a live spectrogram as audio moved through the pipeline from left to right.

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