Kirk McElhearn - Take Control of Audio Hijack (1.1)

Welcome to Take Control of Audio Hijack, version 1.1, published in June 2016 by TidBITS Publishing Inc. This book was written by Kirk McElhearn and edited by Geoff Duncan and Tonya Engst.

This book tells you how to use Rogue Amoebas Audio Hijack 3 to record any audio on your Mac, and to enhance audio while you listen to it. The book also has a chapter explaining how you can edit your recordings with Rogue Amoebas Fission 2.

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Copyright 2016, Eyes of the World Limited. All rights reserved.

This book was sponsored by Rogue Amoeba. Special thanks to Paul Kafasis for giving us great feedback (the good kind) and keeping our signal-to-noise ratio at the correct level.

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To review background information that might help you understand this book better, such as finding System Preferences and working with files in the Finder, read Tonya Engsts free ebook Read Me First: A Take Control Crash Course, available for free on the Web or as a standalone ebook in PDF, EPUB, and the Kindles Mobipocket format.

Version 1.1 of this book contains two new paragraphs of text, each of which describes capabilities added in Audio Hijack 3.3:

• Latency slider: Audio Hijacks preferences now include a Latency slider that may help reduce echo in certain live recording situations. See .
• New default .mp4 container for AAC and Apple Lossless: I describe this in a new sidebar, . You can also now convert a file from .mp4 to .m4a from the Recordings tabControl-click the files listing on the tab to open the new-in-3.3 contextual menu, which offers a command for this conversion.

Ive been using Audio Hijack for so long, I cant remember when I first bought it from Rogue Amoeba. The app has been around since 2002for many years under the moniker Audio Hijack Proand has evolved as OS Xs capability to play and stream audio has changed. I bought the app to record streaming audio, such as concerts or radio shows, captured from the once-essential RealPlayer. This was before podcasts became common and before radio stations offered Web streams.

I also remember using it to digitize cassette tapes, connecting my tape deck to my Mac with a Griffin iMic, a nifty device that served as an interface between a 1/8-inch audio jack and a USB port. Ive used it since then to capture audio from DVDs, record interviews on Skype, and record concerts streamed on the Internet. I also use it weekly to record my own podcast episodes.

Designed for occasional recorders as well as professional podcasters, Audio Hijack lets you record any audio, from any app, or from any microphone or audio input device connected to your Mac. Its easy to use, and as youll see in this book, you can start recording with just six steps. Audio Hijack also has plenty of advanced features, such as recording audio in a variety of formats and bit rates, and recording multiple streams and saving them to one or more files.

You can also use Audio Hijack to enhance audio that plays through your Mac, increasing volume, equalizing the sound, enhancing mono audio, adjusting balance, and much more. (Dont worry if you dont understand those terms; you can get a lot of mileage out of Audio Hijack without learning anything complicated, and I explain these features in the book.) And, you can listen to audio while its recording, pausing and rewinding, or time shifting, as you record.

In this book, I look at Audio Hijack 3, and I call it Audio Hijack throughout. To run Audio Hijack 3, youll need a Mac running OS X 10.9 Mavericks or later. Youll find that Audio Hijack strikes that rare balance of software that is at once powerful, flexible, and easy to use.