I haven’t been a Mac user for long so I asked a simple question on Twitter (@theaudiogeek), “What’s your favorite FREE Mac apps and utilities?” I got a ton of answers and after a few weeks of trying them out, here’s what I find I use on a daily basis, in no particular order.
- Firefox - Doesn’t need much explanation does it? The best browser. There is a small catch though, the default theme on the mac doesn’t do bookmark icons so I needed to track down a theme that does, I went with Camifox.
- xACT – I use this to encode and decode audio files to various formats including FLAC
- Songbird - I personally hate iTunes, Songbird is made by Mozilla and has most of the features of Firefox included. A major in my like of Songbird and dislike of iTunes is integrated FLAC support. 90% of my music library is FLAC files. I now use Cog (see below)
- Adium – A great instant messenger App, for those that use such things, very customizable, I suggest getting Growl notifier too.
- AppTrap – Uninstalling programs on OSX is pretty straightforward, just drop it in the trash. However that doesn’t remove all the additional associated system files. Enter AppTrap which simply asks if you want to keep the system files or delete them too whenever you drop a program in the trash.
- The Unarchiver – Handles more compressed archive formats than OSX on it’s own, such as RAR and 7-Zip.
- SimplyRAR – I use this to make RAR archives, like zip but with much better compression options.
- Stickies – Post it notes on your virtual desktop, pretty helpful, included with OSX.
- Grab – This one is already included in OSX, but you may not have noticed it (in the utilities folder). Should handle all your screenshot needs, besides video. Try Skitch instead.
- Picasa – I got used to using Picasa on my PC because its an awesome photo organizing program. Sure I could just use iPhoto, but I avoid “lowercase i” prefixes whenever possible.
- Xee - Admit it, Preview sucks, try Xee a lightweight and fast image viewer.
- Open Office – Why pay for an office suite when this free one works great?
- Quicksilver – This may be a little advanced, but it’s a great tool for quick execution of a variety of things. Extremely powerful tool, if you take the time to learn it.
- Yasu – I admit I haven’t actually ran this utility yet, I have a 3 week old mac, not really necessary. BUT when I do need to do some maintenance, this is the one to use. If you haven’t thought about cleaning up your Mac recently (or ever?!) Run Yasu tonight.
- Time Machine – Another great one included with OSX. This is a simple backup program, which means you have no excuse NOT to have a backup of your system. Hourly, daily, weekly, monthly backups until your backup drive is filled, I had some issues with it interfering with Pro Tools during recording, so set it to manual and backup once a day or whenever you think of it.
- SuperDuper! – Complete system backup (including drive cloning) and recovery made simple.
- Pro Tools Prefs & Database Helper – I wish this wasn’t necessary, but Pro Tools has problems, and this helps with the most common ones.
New stuff! [added 10/18/2009]
- FreeMind – I just started using this to brainstorm topics for the blog and podcast. Really easy to use software to make you at least feel more productive.
- Skitch – Man, what a great program! Screen capture, drawing, and sharing instantly and intuitively. HIGHLY recommended. I wish I had this on my PC too.
More New stuff! [added 01/01/2010]
- Cog Audio Player I now use Cog all the time, I love that it plays all formats and is so minimal, just a list of songs with playback controls.
So that’s it, those are what I use most often. Of course if I had those all in the dock it would be ridiculous, instead I have a folder named “Most Used Apps” with aliases to some of them on the right side of the dock. As you can see I keep my dock minimal.
Don’t worry, this isn’t site isn’t going to be taken over by Mac fanaticism I just find these programs really helpful. I’ll keep this up to date adding new ones I find and crossing off the apps that fall from favor.
Also Interesting:
Switch is another good one! It’s a super lightweight audio file converter. I use it all the time instead of iTunes for converting to/from mp3. Also saves having to pay for the digi mp3 exporter option
Also check out Filelist (for 10.4) or NameMangler (for 10.5) Great batch file renaming utility! Works much better than the auto rename function in the pro tools region bin.
Thanks Anthony! Those look tasty
plus one for swtich. love it!
Logic users should be aware that, if you use Yasu to clean your system caches, you will have to revalidate your Audio Unit plugins. However, this isn’t really a big deal if you remember to launch Logic and revalidate before your next session.
No need for any icons in the dock Apple + Space bar
Spotlight is great app launcher
http://www.videolan.org/vlc/
One of my favorite media players on both mac an pc is VLC, it handles pretty much every format, simple, lightweight and fast.
http://sbooth.org/Max/
http://tmkk.hp.infoseek.co.jp/xld/index_e.html
For audio conversion I use Max and XLD, they’re both very quick, know a lot of formats I really recommend them. I prefer Max though because I found XLD occasionally unstable when ripping from discs.
http://perian.org/
Perian is a great utility that widely extends quicktime’s native support for a lot of video formats.
http://www.disktracker.com/
DiskTracker is a great disc cataloging application with lots of useful features. If you have a lot of discs like me, like hundreds or more it comes very handy. It’s not fully freeware, if you don’t buy it you have to wait about 30 secs each time you open it. It’s not that bad.
http://www.obdev.at/products/littlesnitch/index.html
Little Snitch is a great tool that is constantly monitoring all outgoing network connections of applications according to your preferences.
For extracting .rar archives I’m using UnRarX.
http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/28158
Backup Disabler is a nice tiny tool if you have and iPhone, iPod Touch or iPod. When you’re updating your device’s system with iTunes, as default it backs everything up beforehand which can take hours for some silly reason. You could only disable it in terminal but they made an app that does the same thing but you only push a button.
MPEG Streamclip is a nice video converter though I prefer VisualHub but VisualHub is not free.
Agree with dyLAB, I just wanted to suggest spotlight with that shortcut (mostly because I tend to or at least try to use the keyboard only).
Great post! Thank You! I’m checking out those I haven’t known.
Alfred is amazing, check it out. It’s like finder but you can limit what folders it searches (like just searching the applications folder or documents folder). It also searches the internet if it can’t find what you are looking for.