Application round up for Mac

Thought I’d write a quick write up of some useful applications I’ve been using for the Mac.

Music Apps

BeaTunes - £12.

• The main feature is to creating intelligent playlists, called Matchlists, where you can highlight a favourite song, and BeaTunes finds other similar songs in your library and creates a playlist form it. You need to fiddle with the settings to get a decent output, but it produces good results and has a habit of dredging up a few of those tracks you forgot you liked.
• This is largely based on the BPM and ‘colour’ of the tracks in your Library which BeaTunes determines by scanning your entire library (leave it overnight, it takes a while).
• Also highlights and helps fixes inconsistencies in your library and can bean be used to inject metadata from MusicBrainz, but I’ve found this is not as good as iEatBrainz (below)

iEatBrainz – free

• Good tool for tagging your music which has missing or incomplete meta tags by getting data from MusicBrainz.
• The good thing about the results is that you get to choose the matching data from a drop down list of possible matches, allowing you fine control over the information that gets added.
• Unfortunately, as it currently stands an undocumented “feature” of iTunes 7.7 applescript API means this tool no longer works, but I’m hoping the open source community can resolve this. The only viable alternative I’ve found is MusicBrainz own Picard tool, which does the same job although the interface and workflow are needlessly complex.

Syncopation – £15

• Sync iTunes libraries between computers really easily. Of course you could just copy the music files, but you lose all the iTunes data such as ratings and play counts – this tool is a way to perform a one-off sync and if you want to maintain synchronicity you can pay about £15 for a licence. Now if only they’d extend this to iPhoto libraries, too.

Join Together – free

• Join a series of tracks together into a single large file. Great for mixes and compilations which have the tendency to pollute your library with loads of obscure tracks.

last.fm plugin -free

• When you sync your iPod, the tracks you listen to are automatically scrobbled to your last.fm account.
• last.fm is great for recommending related artists and letting you know when bands are touring.
• The best features of last.fm is they have a calendar of recommended gigs, based on my tastes, which I’ve added to my gCal. very cool.
• I’d previously been using iLike but the recommendations iLike makes, and its understanding of music is lame in comparison.

Video

Handbrake – free

• extracts video files from DVD’s and exports them in formats and sizes compatible with iPods.
• Great way to get The Mighty Boosh on your iPod!

iSquint – free

• Takes a video file and again exports in formats and sizes compatible with iPod.
• Can convert FLV’s so if you download a video from YouTube (e.g. using Firefox/Greasemonkey/Youtube Downloader) you can get them onto your iPod

Saving space

My 80Gb hard drive is starting to get full, so what are the options without backing up and removing your data, or installing a new drive?

Monolingual – free

• Removes alternative language packs from OS X

XSlimmer – £7

• Removes unnecessary languages from all your applications – such as Safari which has 12 languages by default. It also removes unnecessary code, which I assume means that Intel code is removed from a mac with a PPC chip and vice versa.

Miscellaneous

Little Snitch - £15

• Warns you about outgoing internet traffic from applications you have installed. A must for the paranoid.

facebookSync – free

• Extracting friend info from Facebook into your Mac Address book. I’ve also got a Plaxo account which I use as a place to keep all my home and work contacts in sync, so new data added to Address Book gets uploaded to Plaxo without any bother.

FreeMind - free

• Mind mapping tool for Mac and Windows. Interface is self explanatory and has most features you need instead of buying MindManager. For extra coolness, you can upload your MindMap files to MindMeister and work collaboratively online with Mindmap’s.