Tags

SoundSource is a menu bar app from the fine folks at Rogue Amoeba. This powerful utility gives you fast access to system devices, allowing you to control the settings for your Mac's output, input, and sound effect audio devices right from your menu bar.

You can apply per-application audio adjustments like changing the volume of any app relative to others as well as sending individual apps to different audio outputs.

SoundSource also lets you apply audio effects everywhere. You can make any app's audio sound great with simple built-in effects as well as support for Audio Units plugins. Join Allison as she takes you through its features and benefits.

ChatGPT is integrating with a lot more apps and services. One of the most recent, at the time of recording, is Apple Music. By leveraging its ability to query the Apple Music library of artists, albums and tracks, you can create some playlists that really work for you, whilst still being mindful of the privacy restrictions you would expect from Apple.

In this video. Lee walks through how to connect the services, and demonstrates some example prompts that you may draw inspiration from. You also see some of the differences between using Apple Music and Spotify with ChatGPT. The privacy considerations of one are very different from the other. We'll leave you to guess which one is more secure…

In the previous show, Lee took you on a tour of Apple Music and showed you how to discover music, create playlists and make the most of Apple's streaming service.  In this tip video, he builds on this knowledge and shows some examples of how you can use Shortcuts to play music quicker by using your voice.Lee continues by demonstrating how to build shortcuts that can dynamically create new playlists every time you run them.  Finally, you learn how to get to some of the most popular Apple Music shortcuts found in the Shortcuts Gallery right on your Home Screen or Control Centre, ready for you to trigger with a tap.Apple Music requires iOS and iPadOS 13 or newer, and macOS 10.9.5 or newer.

It's been almost 10 years since Apple Music landed and we've yet to cover this popular streaming service on ScreenCastsONLINE.  As music is a pet passion of Lee's, he decided it was time to right that wrong and walk you through how to make the most of your subscription.In this video, there is a lot of time spent on the iPad as both the iPad and iPhone versions of the Music app are very similar.  On these devices, you'll learn a variety of ways to search for music, both new and old, as well as create playlists, manage queues, collaborate with others on shared playlists, and much more.The Mac version is also covered in this video, and whilst the premise of discovering and playing back music is largely the same, macOS offers more functionality, such as creating Playlist Folders, Smart Playlists, as well as making changes to your music's metadata. By the end of this video, you'll have a firm grasp on all that Apple Music has to offer.

Audacity, a multi-track audio recorder and editor, has been in active development by the open source community for 25 years. Even though it's free, it's an incredibly powerful tool. In this tutorial Allison shows how to navigate the entirety of the user interface of Audacity, and gives you a taste of some of the more advanced features it offers. You also learn how to search the extensive and extensive user manual, in case you want to dig even deeper with Audacity. Oh, and don't miss the really cool web search tip from Allison towards the end.

As this dot release of iOS comes with some great new features, we thought we’d dedicate a tip video to it to get you up to speed as soon as possible! With the 17.2 release the long-awaited Journal application makes its debut on iPhone, allowing users to record activities, thoughts and feelings in a secure, portable manner.

Lee does an "unboxing" of the app before your eyes, and he also touches on other nice 17.2 features: updates to the Action Button, recording Spatial Video (iPhone 15 Pro only), Messages, and a favourites playlist in Music.

In show 1285, Lee took the plunge and covered Marvis Pro, arguably the most detailed and configurable Apple Music player you can get. In this tip video, he shows you how to configure widgets that point to the different sections of your Marvis Pro library, as well as sync all of your settings between iPad and iPhone.

Marvis Pro has been a popular Apple Music player for power users for a number of years now. Due to the level of complexity that you can go into with the app, Lee has always given it a wide berth. Until now.

Marvis Pro allows you to tailor your Apple Music experience to your own liking, allowing you to create your own sections, groups, tabs and even redesign your Home Page so it only shows the music you want to see. In this video, Lee teaches you all of the basics required to start using Marvis Pro.

Shift provides people with complex workflows requiring many apps a platform to combine them all. In this video Darcy showcases how to add accounts from Slack, Dropbox, Airtable and more into a streamlined interface, allowing you to increase ease of access between them and a more focused environment for your projects. Shift is a great way to declutter your desktop of windows by bundling them all together into one, with dozens of apps available to integrate. You also learn how to add extensions within Shift.

The Apple Watch can be an all-purpose audio entertainment device. With the iPod now long gone, consumers can still leave their iPhone at home and take music, podcasts and audiobooks with them on the go. In this tip Darcy takes you through the experience of syncing and streaming content with the Watch app, including how to control the Music app on your Mac using your Apple Watch.

If you prefer listening to full albums rather than playlists, and would rather launch them from a single widget than search in your music app, "Albums: Music Shortcuts" may just be the app for you. It is free and allows you to create various size widgets on your iOS device for albums that you have in either Apple Music or Spotify. It's simple to use and in this video, Lee walks you through the setup.

In this tip, Darcy brings you Apple's new music app, Classical, which Apple Music subscribers now have access to. This a dedicated app that focuses on how classical music is found and organised to create a better searching and listening experience. Whether you're looking for composers, conductors, or your favorite soloist or even instrument, Apple Music Classical's Browse tab makes finding (and favoriting) the exact version you want a lot easier.

Earlier in the year, in show 1134, Lee covered an app on iOS called Albums that centred around recommending and playing albums in Apple Music in their entirety. Whilst this is great for looking at individual albums, we all love to have that shuffle factor that a playlist can bring. SongCapsule (formerly known as Next) fills that gap. A cross-platform application, it uses a feature called MagicDJs to look at your play history and creates a number of different playlists based on artist and genre automatically, as well as offering the ability to create your own. In this video, Lee walks you through the iOS version of the app.

As a music lover, there are lots of apps that Lee has recommended here at SCO to help you build your music library. However the most used app has gone uncovered—until now. Shazam allows you to identify the title and artist of a song that is currently playing. More than this, it can automatically add this track to a playlist in either Apple Music or Spotify, as well as view similar music, track concert information for artists, and more.

After using his original Synology NAS for about 5 years, Don decided to upgrade it to a newer model when his unit started exhibiting some performance issues. There have been a lot of changes and improvements since we first covered Synology hardware back in 2017, so in this episode Don takes a fresh look at features that are part of the operating system. After going over the basics, you discover options like setting up Time Machine backups, as well as setting up Synology Drive on both Mac and iPad.

Sometimes an app comes around that you didn't know you needed. With a proven pedigree in app development around media, thanks to releases like MusicHarbor and Play, Marcos Tanaka gives us MusicBox, a music application based on the premise of a Read-it-Later service. In this video, Lee shows you how to add music into MusicBox from a variety of sources, organise it with tags both manually and automatically, as well as create Smart Searches.

Audio Hijack allows you access to record and route audio in ways that Apple didn’t build into macOS. Version 4 brings a dramatically improved user interface, making it easier for new users to understand and filled with enhancements for those already familiar with the software. Allison is here to show you this versatile audio tool and its features, using real world examples.

The brains behind the MusicHarbor app on iOS, Marcos Tanaka, has switched gears from audio to video, with a Universal application called Play that allows you to find and catalogue YouTube videos for future viewing. In this short video, Lee goes through its features using his iPad, including the ability to organise your favourites using tags as well as descriptions.

Apple Music has become a very popular subscription option for streaming music. The native Music app, however, still leaves a lot to be desired, especially for those of us who favour listening to albums from front to back, in the original order. Albums, by Adam Linder, is an excellent option that can help with this. It allows you to easily find music in your library, create playlists from collections of albums that can be filtered, and provide useful stats on your listening history.

macOS Monterey includes several applications to help you manage and enjoy various types of media. This week, Todd walks you through the main features of the Music, Podcasts, TV, and Books apps on the Mac. These apps have gone through some subtle but important changes over the last few years and this fresh look brings you up to speed.

Todd also covers the benefits of AirPlay 2 for sharing audio throughout your home.