The Beautiful Stream of Music

Sometimes there’s no substitute for doing things yourself, because you can, and because it’s fun. Being a DJ on your own radio station falls into that category, and like most other media creation activities on the Mac, it’s easy and fun to do. Programs like Nicecast make it so.

I don’t have the time or interest to be an internet DJ, but I have occasionally fired up a stream for a handful of friends for an hour or so. Nicecast is perfect for this. The concept of Nicecast is that you can choose an app to hijack and broadcast it in a couple different ways. Rogue Amoeba’s blurb states that it’s great for broadcasting to the world, or just across your house, and they do not lie.

When you fire up Nicecast, you see a window that has controls for starting/stopping the broadcast, a status indicator, a level indicator, a selection area for the audio source, and several buttons to additional Nicecast settings.

Choosing the app you want to use as your audio source couldn’t be easier. Set the source dropdown to “Application”, click the “Select” dropdown, and choose your app. You can also set the Source to System Audio or Audio Device. The latter is the way you could, for example, play live music and run it from your mixer into your Mac and stream it to the internet. Powerful stuff.

Ok, so now we have set iTunes as our audio source… how does that help us DJ? Doesn’t being a DJ involve being able to open the Mic and yammer at people inbetween, during, or instead of playing songs? Yep. And that’s where the effects panel in Nicecast comes into play. Clicking the “Effects” button on the main app window opens the Effects window. Clicking in an empty slot on that will allow you to insert an effect to be applied to your music stream. The effect you want to add if you’d like to DJ is the Voice Over effect.

You can click on the Voice Over panel’s “Editor” button to adjust Device, Crossfade, and Autoducking features. Crossfade lets you adjust how much of the output volume is allocated to the voice source vs the main audio source. Autoducking presumably lets you have it such that the music volume would lower as you begin to speak, and increase again as you stop, but I haven’t used this feature in practice.

Before we can stream, we need to choose a streaming server configuration. You can use the built in server to let people connect directly to your Nicecast server, or you can set up to stream through an external service, such as Live365. The advantage of the internal server is that it costs nothing and is easy - just choose that option and off you go. The disadvantages are that people are connecting directly to you, which means you can saturate your bandwidth, and you are opening yourself up to external connections. The advantages of the external servers are that they can potentially let many more listeners connect, and they keep your computer from being directly accessed. On the other hand, they cost money and require additional configuration and another layer of learning to get your music out to the world.

Are we finally ready to rock? Whew. All we wanted was some music, right? In our case, we have iTunes set up as our app of choice, so we click Nicecast’s “Start Broadcast” button, switch over to iTunes, choose a song, and off we go.

And … woohoo!! We’re streaming. Just one thing. How do people hear our music? Easy enough, click the “share” button if you’re using the internal server, and you’ll be presented with a URL to let people connect with.

The Internet address is the one to give to people accessing you from outside, while the Local address is what you’d use if you just wanted to stream to other computers in your house on the same network. If you’re using an external shoutcast type server, you’ll have a URL assigned to you by that host instead, and neither of these will apply.

Ok, so now that I’ve babbled on and on and pasted pretty pictures for you, what’s my take on Nicecast? My take is that for basic audio streaming, it couldn’t be simpler. Select an app, set up your server options, click “Start Broadcast”, and you are in business. Nothing more to do.

It did take me a little fighting to figure out how to do voice over… I had to find the Voice Over effect, figure out that you had to click “editor” and click the “Start” button in there as well, before starting the broadcast, etc, etc. It would be nice if the user manual had a list of recipes, such as “To DJ with voice over capability” but they really don’t. Although they have a pretty good index of the effects that can be applied, there are no examples provided anywhere.

Still, I have to give Nicecast an A at least. It’s easy to use, does the job, and on my fiber connection, several people can be connected at once and things just keep humming along. I like it.

Authorized Wiretap

Ever wanted to wiretap someone? Gain sneaky access to their conversations or hear what they are up to? Well, you can… wiretap yourself with WireTap Studio.

WireTap Studio lets you capture any audio source on your Mac - inputs, applications, even system audio. That means you can capture any sound that goes in or out of your Mac. And not just capture - WireTap Studio lets you edit it non-destructively (meaning the source recording is not altered) including adding effects and previewing how your compressed audio will sound, and manage your recordings in the WireTap Studio library. From there you can export them to disk, email them, etc. It’s versatile and simple to use.

The WireTap controller window. Set your audio sources, record, pause, stop, open the library, preferences, and more from here.

You can select two audio sources to wiretap, including system audio (everything). This means you could record mic input and all system output audio as well if you wanted.

When you’re recording, the controller shows you an indicator with a red record button. Here I’m recording one audio source, iTunes, with no second source selected.

When you stop spying on.. i mean RECORDING yourself, the waveform editor pops up to let you edit the recorded audio. This is non-destructive editing, meaning the original capture is kept safe and sound in case you regret your foolish edits or you need something desperately for your court appearance.

You can also add effects, in case you have some need to alter your voice.

Recordings are saved in the WireTap Library, for doing various things to. For example, once you’ve got the finished product you want, you can export to disk using your desired compression, email to the government, send it to itunes or your iphone, sor any of several other options for using your tapped audio.

Some of you might know that I used to be a huge fan of Audio Hijack Pro for capturing audio sources on the Mac. The fact of the matter was that AHP could do most things I needed, but then I ran into a couple situations where, although it was supposedly hijacking a specific app or the system audio, it was not catching everything. Some apps it would come up and say it just couldn’t hijack. So far I haven’t found anything WireTap Studio can’t handle, and handle well. Also, at the time I purchased this, there was a competitive upgrade price for owners of Audio Hijack Pro.

I have to say, at the moment, there’s nothing better for taking audio on your Mac and making it truly yours. This app does the job, does it well, gives you control over the final product, and does so without destroying your original capture. Right now it appears to be the top dog in the … well, sorry.. the audio hijacking software business.

Screencasting with ScreenFlow

Okay, I’ve been talking a little bit about screen capture apps, mentioning snapz pro x and ishowu. I think for doing something like capturing game action (WoW junkies, listen up), ishowu is probably the best choice (Update: I don’t think this is the case anymore. I think ScreenFlow is probably better for this too). But for general screen presentation, a recently released product called ScreenFlow just flat out rocks. For how simple it is to make great screen casts, it’s pretty mind blowing really. And for $99.00, it’s a bargain for anyone who depends on screen casts for a living or for serious information sharing.

ScreenFlow takes the approach of recording the whole screen area, unlike some of the other screen video capture tools. You can adjust the zoom, and you can crop the area if you want. But basically, it starts off by default capturing the whole screen and then letting you add Video Events to do what you want within that space.

Below are the media tracks in my video: the isight track on top, and the screen capture video underneath.

If you watch my video on MS Interoperability that was produced with ScreenFlow, you’ll see that I am capturing the screen as well as my isight video, and that I then slide the isight video off the screen and change my zoom and focus areas as I go. These are all done by adding video events on the appropriate media track, and then making those events be whatever change I want. The length of the event determines how quickly the changes take place. In the image below, the purple squares on the two media tracks are video events I’ve added to slide the isight image off the screen, and zoom in on the various things I’m discussing.

The changes can be made on the workspace by moving things, cropping things, etc, or in the Properties panels. Here is the video properties panel for the screen track. As you see, you can also edit audio properties, cursor effects, and more.

You can start/stop recording with Command-Shift-2, or use the ScreenFlow menu in the menu bar by clicking its icon. The neat thing is, you can stop, then start again and it will ask if you want to append to the existing project, or make a new one.

There’s a lot more to this application, so download a copy and have at it. Any video exported will display “DEMO MODE” in nice huge letters across it unless you unlock it by purchasing a key for $99.00.

I Tell You, iShowU !

Awhile ago, I promised to talk about stuff no one cares about, and I’m gonna fulfill that promise for you, the non-reader. Non-reader? That’s right, i know none of you are reading anyway. But if you are, please don’t tell me. Right now the pressure level here is at zero. I kinda like it that way.

One of the things I really like about the Mac is the amount of ease in making media on this platform. For podcasting, there’s things like Ubercaster and GarageBand, for grabbing any kind of sound like skype conversations, online radio, iTunes music, any other sound on your Mac, there’s Audio Hijack Pro and Wiretap Studio. And for doing video capture, there’s excellent options such as Snapz Pro X and iShowU. Let’s look at iShowU, which has quickly become my favorite video capture app on the mac.

Running iShowU brings up the following application window.

On the left is a “presets” pane, so you can easily select a specific group of settings to use for your video. Anytime you tweak any of the settings in a preset, the new settings are saved automatically, so be aware. You can also add new presets and put your own settings in.

Then in the larger pane, there’s detailed options for the audio, video, and some miscellaneous UI settings. This is where you’ll determine what sound sources to grab, what the video size and quality and capture area will be, as well as encoding method, etc, and then whether or not to show the cursor, show capture guides, follow the mouse (can cause nausea, so be careful), etc.

To set up the record area, you can click “Edit Recording Area” at the bottom of the screen, or do a command-shift-3 instead. You can then resize and position the recording area as shown here.

Even here, there’s some helpful preset shortcuts. Press command-4 to go full screen size, and then command-3 down to command-1 for 1/2 size, 1/4 size, and 1/8 size. Or just use the area select rectangles edge handles and resize it to whatever you want. Move it around as you would any other area selection tool, and hit return when done to save the recording area settings.

Okay, well that’s all wonderful, but how do you record? Well, you can either use the record button on the iShowU window, or you can hide it and start recording with command-a. Command-p pauses and resumes, command-c lets you set the area again, and command-t stops the recording. The keyboard shortcuts can be found in the iShowU preferences.

iShowU has a menubar icon when running that lets you choose these things also, but more importantly it has a red flashing square when you are recording, and red lines when you are paused, so you always know what state of capture are you in or not in. It’s mildly annoying to get everything set up and record for 20 minutes without actually starting the recording. Ahem.

I like iShowU for its flexibility, the ability to pause, the quick ’save as you go’ method, and other good stuff. This does mean that you can’t change the video or audio settings after the recording - you’re stuck with whatever you chose beforehand - but that’s fine for most uses and the program works very well in all cases.

Here’s a demo clip I made on creating encrypted dmg files (see my earlier blog post) using iShowU. Please note that it looks kind of fuzzy, and that’s partially due to YouTube’s compression, and partially because I should have used less recording area for what I was doing. When YouTube shrinks it down, it gets hard to see stuff.

You can download a demo of the product here, and I recommend doing so. BTW, this works great under leopard.