PD Music Composer
 
music_composer_vox app
A short time ago I stumble across a great post from WinkSound - with some excellent tools to help convert, play and share audio. I have since been using this trio of Mac apps to streamline sending demos of tracks I am working on to clients.

But taking these free (yes, free!) apps away from an audio creation context, two in particular are indispensable for quickly and easily sending files to the cloud or listening to audio.

1. Cloud - this is a simple little app to enable very easy transfer of files to cloud storage. The basic plan is free, and fine for most file-transferring needs but not suitable so for long-term backup or storage. Once signed up, simply dragging a file into the app's icon will transfer it to the cloud. Further streamlining things, as soon as the upload is complete the link to your upload is automatically copied to your clipboard, ready to paste into an email.

2. Vox - anyone on a Mac would be familiar with the common process of being able to listen to an audio file such as a WAV or mp3 by simply highlighting the file and pressing space bar (to play it in the Finder preview window) or double clicking it to open it in iTunes. Each of these processes has its shortfalls. The preview window won't enable the audio file to keep playing in the background if you switch to another app or select another file. Alternatively, adding a file to iTunes every time you listen to something new is a time consuming and unnecessary process. Vox is a lightweight audio player which is great to get around both of these issues. I especially like the app's icon which displays a neat, circular playback progress status during play.

Hope these tips help musicians and non-musicians alike.

 
 
Switch audio converter
Earlier this week I was completing work for a client who required audio output as a WAV file with a 48kHz sample rate. As my audio editing program by default created the track at a sample rate of 44.1kHz (standard for CD audio), converting the sample rate once the music had already been created was a little tricky.

If I knew the required sample rate when I began the project, I could have set up my recording software accordingly. However, changing the sample rate at the end of the recording process was a challenge. Exporting my finished audio at the higher sample rate (converting it from 44.1kHz to 48kHz) naturally resulted in a shortening in the length of the track and an increase in pitch. A quick Google finds that this is a common problem.

There are many ways to approach this challenge. The purpose of this post is to share what I found to be an incredibly easy solution. A simple conversion using NCH Software's Switch Audio Converter (yes, even using the free version!). I'm happy to say as well these guys are Australian!

Switch is available for both Mac and Windows is is a very powerful audio tool. The feature list is large and includes the ability to convert between a pretty exhaustive range of common audio formats, extract audio from video files and DVDs, automatically normalize the audio when converting, and most importantly in my case - it supports a wide range of sample rates when encoding WAV format.

So, my 41.kHz to 48kHz conversion was as simple as dragging and dropping the audio file into Switch, selecting WAV as the output format and changing the encoder setting to 48kHz. The outcome was perfect.

Just wanted to share this quick tip for anyone else who's needed a quick resolution to this same challenge.

Happy converting!