Awhile back, we reviewed Wave Editor, and deemed it one of our favorite audio editors for Mac OS X. Our friends at Audiofile Engineering have ushered in the holiday season with a complete site redesign and numerous application updates, including the highly anticipated Wave Editor 1.3, and Leopard-ready updates to apps across the board.

You may also recall that Audiofile Engineering recently rescued the excellent instrument and effect host, Rax - formerly developed by our friends at plasq. It is clear that Apple borrowed heavily from Rax’s design choices and intentions with their new MainStage application (bundled with Logic 8) but with its impressive features, custom interfaces for audio units, cool visualizer support, and active development, Rax is still the application to beat in this domain.

Competitive upgrade, crossgrade and educational pricing, sleek new icons, one of the finest audio application suites in the industry (and did we mention a simple, non-draconian form of authorization?) - Audiofile Engineering has definitely brightened the days for Mac users this season!

Speaking of sample management on the Mac, AudioFinder, the popular sample utility, is now in beta of its version 4.7. The new release integrates a basic waveform editor for quick adjustments to sound files. From the software’s forum:

This is not a new audio editor to compete with Peak, DSP Quatro or Wave Edit. This is a utility to save time editing samples. It has a maximum file length limit of 30 minutes. It is 32bit floating point. It saves all files as AIFF, and soon CAF.

AudioFinder 4.7 Beta
Sounds good to me. Could be especially handy editing my Ableton Live clips and samples and such.

Generally, Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard has been working pretty well for most users, though we continue to hear a number of complaints about compatibility with M-Audio hardware. There are some annoyances, though, including one glitch as far as routing audio between apps. Updated: the good news is, this is fixable.

In the “bad” category, Paul Davis, the creator of JACK and Ardour, writes:

Leopard has stopped JACK and other inter-application audio routers from being used as the default audio device. Apple is now distributing an SDK that is aimed at “aiding” developers in writing user-space CoreAudio “drivers” such as JACK and SoundFlower. Early reports suggest that the SDK requires a much more complex design. JACK still runs on Leopard, and so JACK-aware apps (i.e. Linux audio apps ported to OS X like Ardour and Jamin) can use it, but native apps can no longer be connected to each other or to JACK applications. Work is underway to make JACK use this new SDK but it appears to be a non-trivial effort. Apple’s motive in making this change is not clear.

Now, the good news. JACK OS X’s developers chime in in comments to point out progress is being made. And this is even a good thing. (Unfortunately, such is the way with OSes — for even small improvements, you have to break, then fix things, then reap the benefits, sometimes not immediately.) From Stephane:

SoundFlower is actually a “kernel space” driver that is somewhat much more easier to develop and maintain

• Apple SDK is definitively a step forward to develop more compliant “user-space” drivers, even if mastering the new code layering takes some time…
• as Dan said, the new version is almost ready and should be more compliant (more application working correctly with it)

And a beta is available now.

In other words, if you use these apps in a critical project, you might want to hold off upgrading, but otherwise all is well. I’ll be sure to post an update when a fix is ready. Note that Audio Hijack is now compatible with Mac OS X 10.5, though that doesn’t allow many of the musical applications possible with JACK and SoundFlower.

A subtler UI annoyance, Apple has somewhat crippled the audio previews you get in Finder’s multi-column view. You get the “play” button in the last column, as before, but no scrubbing or volume control. QuickLook, fortunately, solves the problem. Hit space and you get a full view of your audio file. At first, I thought this would be less convenient, thinking you’d have to preview files one at a time. But you can navigate from one file to another by scrolling up and down with the keyboard to select different files. Thanks to David Hollands for this tip; David says he’s finding QuickLook to be slower than using multi-column view.

Another alternative would be to use a dedicated utility like Iced Audio’s AudioFinder for your sample sorting, which may be better than Leopard or Tiger anyway, depending on your preference.

Sure enough, today we learn that AudioFinder’s new sample editor is in beta. Combined with AF’s other sample juggling tools, the fix may actually be more interesting than the problem.

I consider myself operating system atheistic: I refuse to believe in an operating system unless solid, empirical data is presented proving it exists works. Okay, actually … I spend a considerable amount of time doing production on both Mac and Windows, and even some time working with Linux (not to mention administering Linux servers).

But we’d like to know more about what you use in your music. Our site analytics don’t tell us a whole lot: they tend to sample random users, not regulars, and if you use a work PC to browse, we may not know what you use at home for music.

For that reason, we’d love to have you tell us more about how you work. This isn’t a race, so no need to stuff the ballot box for the OS you like. (And we already know you use some obscure OSes — and some of you even browse CDM from your iPhone, Nintendo Wii, Sun Solaris workstation, Amiga, and PSP, based on our server stats). Anyway, an OS is just as interesting if few of you are using it as if many are. No, the idea is to get an honest metric of what you’re using. We’ll happily share the results.

The survey is now closed. Thanks for your help! We’ll have results up soon.

Native Instruments and MOTU have each posted compatibility update pages for Mac OS X Leopard. There’s not a whole lot of information yet (particularly form MOTU), but now’s the time to bookmark those pages!

Be sure to watch comments from readers for other helpful compatibility information — much of it positive at this point.

Native Instruments: Compatibility with OS X Leopard
NI’s latest versions of Kore, Traktor, Guitar Rig, and Kontakt are all good to go. But other software has some issues related to installation and dialog box operation. While it’s not reported on this page, we’ve also heard one person with a hardware problem. You should see patches over the coming weeks, with major updates in November and December.

Unleash a Leopard in your MOTU studio
Despite the title, actually, you might not want to unleash anything just yet. MOTU says testing is ongoing and hints updates for hardware and software may be likely. MOTU’s virtual instrument line is ready, though, and there are no significant issues reported yet. Best bet: bookmark that page and keep watch. That’s what we’ll be doing.

Tiger in your tank? I’ll say it now: while the issues are minor so far, I don’t recommend upgrading to Leopard on a critical machine. For folks with more than one Mac, many are having relatively smooth experiences, so on a second machine it could make sense. I’m expecting most of the rest of us will just wait a month or two; at least on the Mac updates are usually pretty speedy in coming and the OS itself looks solid.

Oh, yeah, and one other important thing: this is the first Mac OS X update that really doesn’t benefit music users, at least not out of the box. (There are some driver changes, but I don’t think there are yet devices that take advantage of them.) It’s actually good news, in that Core Audio and Core MIDI are mature at this point — you don’t want to regularly update the music and audio plumbing. But that means Tiger will be just fine for some time.

More Java bad news: While I know this interests a smaller audience, there’s been still more disappointments on the Mac Java front.