Top Five FreeWare Audio Apps for Mac OS X Leopard

There's a lot of audio apps out there, and a lot of them are available on a Mac. So naturally, those of us who quest for new software and music related nonsense on our Macs gravitate towards trying these programs out. I've found myself spending lots of time sifting the crap from the useful and productive software and I wouldn't wish it on anyone else. So here's a little countdown of my favorites, some for recording, some for organization, some for fun.

5) Pacemaker Editor - Pacemaker Editor is on one hand, the software back end to the PaceMaker Player device. It is also a standalone application used to create mixes. With some cool effects and tools preloaded and a very good interface for creating mixes, I highly recommend giving this one a try. They also have a very nice website where you can upload mixes, share music, and enter contests.

4) iEatBrainz - iEatBrainz is a utility for tagging and editing/fixing tags for the songs in your music library. It operates from the MusicBrainz library, an open source project to provide information for songs and albums online. It's pretty accurate and has recently been updated to work with the latest versions of OS X and iTunes. There are a few other apps out there that accomplish the same thing, but I have the best results, personally, with this one

3) Soundflower - Soundflower, offered by cycling74, is an audio utility for routing audio. It could be considered a sort of patch bay for audio applications. I use it to route my audio from Reason out to a standalone analyzing application since Reason doesn't include an analyzer in it's program. Very useful, open-source and free.

2) Switch - NCH Studio's offering, Switch, is a free audio application for switching the formats of your audio. Mp3, wav, aiff, wma, flac, ogg and many more are supported. There is a paid "Pro" version available as well, but the free version handles most things you could think of. I've never found a format that this program couldn't handle and it does batch processing with ease. Another app with many clones, but most offer free versions with limitations that make them virtually unusable in any practical application.

1) Audacity - Audacity is a free and open-source application for recording and processing audio. It has the fairly rare quality of being able to use Apple's included AU plugins as well as most 3rd party plug-ins on the market. I use it for sampling audio as well as applying effects to my samples for pre-processing. Great app, used by lots of people with a great community behind it.

Big thanks to the developers of these applications. I've donated to every single one of you in one way or another and I encourage others to do so as well. Keep up the good work and we'll keep the free and open-source communities alive!