audio

Last night, I was recording a podcast using Ableton Live as usual, and my Mac kindly decided that it was time for a kernel panic. This left me with a few unusable .aiff files, that couldn’t be opened in Live, in QuickLook or any other app.

It looked like I was screwed. Enter Audacity, one of the ugliest applications available for OS X. It has a great feature: it can open raw PCM data, and it was able to successfully recover the whole recording. You just have to click on File/Import/Raw Data and select the corrupted AIFF file. A window like this will pop up:

You’ll have to adjust some settings to match Live’s. I used 44.1 kHz 16 bit mono, but make sure to check your Ableton recording settings to get yours. Don’t worry if you set them wrong, it won’t touch your original file, it will simply not play correctly in Audacity.

Once you have successfully imported your track, you can export it from Audacity in just about any format you might need.

A while back I wrote about my hack that allowed me to have multiple instances of Soundflower that I used to record a multi-track Skype group call for podcasting purposes. That guide became pretty popular, and it was even linked in Cycling 74’s blog.

Today I’m introducing a new project, SoundBlossomer, a little utility that lets you easily add, edit and delete your Soundflower audio interfaces.

Basically, this app figures out which Soundflower instances you already have defined in your /System/Library/Extensions/Soundflower.kext/Contents/Info.plist file and shows them in a list, allowing you to add additional ones, as well as renaming, changing the number of channels and deleting the other ones.

I spent about a day putting together this app, which by the way is my first Mac app ever, and I think it works reasonably well, at least in all the testing I’ve made. If you find any issues, please, let me know.

SoundBlossomer is 100% open source, it is released under the BSD license and you can find all of its source code on the GItHub page. I strongly encourage you to check it out, and even to improve it if you can, I’d gladly pull your changes into the main repository.