Categories: TECHNOLOGY

Audio Hijack Pro – the Best Audio Recording App for Mac OSX

Have you ever been watching a music video online – maybe through AOL or YouTube or Google Video – and decided that you’d like a copy of the music? Or maybe you have a favorite streaming audio blog you listen to, and what you really want is a copy to put on your iPod or iPhone.

What can you do? A lot of music on the Internet is available for listening, but not downloading. Still, there must be a way to get a copy for yourself, right?

There is.

Rogue Amoeba, a shareware developer of Macintosh software, has a program called Audio Hijack Pro that “hijacks” your application, whether that application is iTunes, QuickTime Player, RealPlayer or a Web Browser, reroutes the audio stream so it goes to Audio Hijack Pro before your speakers, and allows you to record it. It then sends the audio to your speakers, and you listen to it just as you normally would.

I’ve written another article on how to record your Skype conversations, and the tool I used was Audio Hijack Pro. So let’s learn a little more about it.

Using Audio Hijack Pro is simple. If you want to record audio from a few of the programs listed above (iTunes, QuickTime Player, and the Safari web browser), “steal” audio from your basic System input, or the audio from a DVD (a concert video, perhaps?), you’re already in business, since Audio Hijack Pro comes with presets already built in for those applications.

If so, all you need to do is start up Audio Hijack Pro, highlight the application you’re going to record audio from, and hit the Hijack button. This will start up that program, and from that point on, all audio from that application is streamed through Audio Hijack Pro before it goes to your computer’s speakers. To record, simply hit the Record button. Now start whatever audio stream you want to listen to. Audio Hijack Pro will record that audio to AIFF (an uncompressed audio format nearly identical to WAV). When you’re through recording, hit the Stop button, and Audio Hijack Pro will save the audio to your hard drive. You can then Release the application, or continue making new recordings.

If that was all Audio Hijack Pro did, it would be a very nice program, although probably not worth the $32.00 shareware fee. However, that isn’t all Audio Hijack Pro can do. Not by a long shot.

Among Audio Hijack Pro’s other features are the ability to add effects to your audio. There are more than 60 audio effects ready and waiting to be used, including the option to “sweeten” the recorded audio by means of added reverb, or the use of a 10-band equalizer. There are built-in effects provided by Apple, such as a compressor, a limiter, and the ability to tweak the pitch of recorded audio.

That isn’t all. You can also set Audio Hijack Pro to perform certain operations to your audio after recording. This is fantastic, since the format Audio Hijack Pro uses – AIFF, as I mentioned earlier – is not very suitable for portable devices. While one minute of audio recorded at standard bitrate MP3 might be around 1 Megabyte, that same minute of audio in AIFF format could be ten times as large. So I’m quite pleased that Audio Hijack Pro is able, after recording and saving your audio, to re-encode the audio using iTunes. This means you can convert your recording to MP3, AAC, Apple Lossless… whatever iTunes can handle.

You can also use Audio Hijack Pro’s post-processing abilities to add your recording to your iPod, to your iTunes library, or you can write (or load) your own Apple Scripts to further add abilities to Audio Hijack Pro.

In addition to all this, Audio Hijack Pro has toolbar buttons for burning a music CD from your recorded audio, and one for an Editor. This is very nice, since sometimes your recording may have too much dead (read: blank) space at the beginning or end of the file, and so if you have an audio editor on your hard drive, you can tell Audio Hijack Pro which one you use, and from then on, you can directly load your recording into it, for even more tweaking.

A few years ago, I purchased Audio Hijack (the precursor to Audio Hijack Pro), and have been a happy user ever since. Audio Hijack suited my needs just fine (and probably still does), but for a new buyer, Audio Hijack Pro is everything you could want in an audio recorder for the Mac. It has a ton of features, is well worth the $32.00 asking price in my mind, is simple to use, looks good, and best of all… just works.