Sunflower

Together 4Front and Subband bring you OSS 3D for OS X. OSS 3D utilizes state of art DSP technology allowing addition of bass spatialization, 3D surround and various other real-time enhancements of the sound played through your system.

OSS 3D provides 3d sound expansions similar to QSound and Spatializer, with additional functionality like Speaker Resonance Correction, Virtual Subwoofer, Brainwave inductance, High Frequency Restoration, Center channel control, and more. Also included a studio quality N-band equalizer with built-in peak limiter to replace default one. OSS 3D greatly improves audio quality in movies and music.

Want to record sound snippets from your favorite DVD movie, digitize your old record collection, record streaming audio from the Internet, or even use your iPod as a personal Dictaphone? WireTap Pro is your solution.

WireTap Pro can save your digital recordings in the popular .mp3, AAC, QuickTime, and AIFF file formats, saving them to your hard drive for later processing/listening. This makes it the perfect tool for recording your own Podcasts. WireTap Pro can also save your recordings directly into iTunes, or onto your iPod or other iTunes-compatible .mp3 player. You have total control over the file format, compression, and quality of your recordings.

Features: gapless playback, smart shuffle, tagging (APE 1.0/2.0, Vorbis comments/FLAC tags, ID3 1.0/1.1/2.3+), seeking.

Songbird is an open source jukebox and media player that “promises to be the Firefox of media players.” Being a jukebox puts it squarely in competition with iTunes, but Songbird offers some unique features that make it worth a look even for hardcore Mac users. (It also runs on other platforms.)

The interface will remind you of iTunes and it’s easy enough to navigate. It can play MP3 and AAC files, but also Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, and WMA. (Of course, it can’t play music purchased from the iTunes Music Store.) It’s built on the same platform as Firefox and will eventually, likewise, offer extensions so you can customize it as much as Firefox. Songbird includes a built-in web browser, which is actually better than you might think. If you browse to a web page that has a podcast or music linked to it, Songbird automatically finds these files and offers to add them to your library.

Songbird hasn’t even reached version 1.0, but it’s already shaping up to be something great and has lots of cool features. I’m excited to see where it goes.

UPDATE: Though I couldn’t get it to work at first go, Jonas wrote to tell me that Songbird can indeed play DRM’ed songs from the iTunes Music Store via the Quicktime plugin.

Download : here

This is useful in a few ways. For instance, maybe you are going to upload a video to Youtube and you want to be sure your site gets credit. Teave it in there on the bottom of the video. Or maybe you are doing home videos of grandpa and he just slurs too much for people to understand. You can type the text out to keep up as he speaks.

Download:here

QuickTunes

Gigavox Media produces my favorite podcasts. They always seem to find great lectures and interviews with technology experts. The audio production is also very professional.

A few days ago they released an application for compressing, normalizing, and limiting an audio file. For example, if you’ve recorded a podcast with Audacity and your voice is much louder than the person you interviewed, simply drag the audio file onto The Levelator and it will automatically be adjusted and normalized.

“Soundflower is a virtual audio device that provides aneasy and simple way for Max/MSP and other applications to send and receive audio to and from any other application. Running with very low latency and cpu usage, Soundflower allows each client application to use its usual buffer size.

Soundflowerbed is an application that resides in the menu bar allowing you to tap into Soundflower channels and route them to an audio device. For more information, refer to the Soundflowerbed section below.”

Download:here

You probably already known that Mac OS X can speak. You can turn on speech in the System Preferences and have it speak everything to you (great for the visually impaired.)

You can also open up the Terminal and type say “Think Different” and it will speak whatever you type. CakeHole is a GUI version of the “say” command. It will speak aloud the words you enter and you can even save the speech to a AIFF file.

Download:here

iRed Lite

iRed Lite lets you use your Apple Remote to control other applications on your Mac.This remote will work with iTunes, Quicktime, etc, out of the box, but the nice thing about iRed Lite is that there is a nice development area for you to add functionality to other apps as well.

Download:here

TotalTunes Control

Take control of iTunes with TotalTunes Control. Think of TotalTunes as a widget/player for iTunes that provides users with a smaller, less intrusive playback center. TotalTunes Control allows users to control playlists, iTunes volume, and much more.

The idea is that Goombah will turn you on to music that you may otherwise not have heard of by showing you what people with similar taste in tunes are listening to.

Download:here

Canto Pod

Canto Pod is a widget for OSX that allows you to download lyrics to your favorite music for viewing at your leisure. So the next time you are wondering to yourself what your favorite mushmouthed rock star is wailing — you’ve got it right there at your disposal.

One of the cooler features in Canto Pod is the music spy. Canto Pod will actually spit out the lyrics to whatever song you happen to be listening to at the time - you don’t even have to do a search or query. Their library is also impressively extensive and grows every day. If you have an iPod, this one is a keeper.

Download:here

Remote Say will allow you to speak from one Mac to another. You just need to have the program playing on both Macs, choose the receiving app from the drop down list, then type and hit return. The receiving Mac will “say” whatever you type.

It’s just a small app, but it’s fun to use.

Download:here

Burn (Disk)

Not to be confused with the personal finance application, this app burns disks — almost any kind. You can burn Mac, Joliet, Mac+PC, or DVD+PC data disks; audio or MP3 audio disks; and VCD, SVCD, DVD, or DIVX video disks. You can also copy disks.

Download:here

LiquidCD

LiquidCD makes it easy to burn almost any kind of CD or DVD. Not that this functionality isn’t mostly native to Mac OS X, but LiquidCD puts it right at your fingertips. You can burn an audio, MP3, or picture CD, burn an .iso, .dmg, .cue/bin, or .toast image, or even duplicate a DVD.

This freeware really comes in handy when you want to burn a music or audio file to a disk quickly. For example, I download college lectures from the internet. Rather than copying it to iTunes, making a playlist with the file, burning it to a cd to listen to in my truck, and then deleting the file back out of iTunes, it’s much easier to just drop it in LiquidCD and burn it there. It’s also nice for audiobooks that don’t really need to be in the iTunes library because you’ll never listen to them again.

Download:here

The interface is incredibly simple. It has perfect integration with iTunes. (In fact, dragging an image over to the turn tables looks like you are loading a record.) You’ll see easy to understand controls. Also, if you press the button that reads “RPM”, you’ll be instructed to beat the tempo of each tune and then you can sync them automatically.

Great software!

Download:here

PandoraMan is a “small cocoa app to run the Pandora mini player using WebKit. Created so you can quit Safari/Camino/etc without killing your music stream.” As you listen to the tunes, you can click on the cover art and “train” the service on the music that you like. You can also get the link to iTunes or Amazon.

So fire up Pandoraman, create a few stations for yourself by naming an artist that you like, and you will certainly find some great music. I have a fairly large music collection in iTunes, but after a while I get tired of my stuff and want to hear something new. This app makes it so convenient.

Download:here

DeKstasy

DeKstasy is, quite possibly, the most amazing DJ software I’ve used on my Mac. But, just like the rest of the software you find here, it is still free.

I’m quite into music, but not a serious DJ by any means. As I read thru the DeKstasy site, I didn’t understand a lot of what they were saying. But, I was very happy to see that the software is completely useable for someone who just likes to be hands on with the way their music is played.

The feature most impressive is the “true automatic beat finding, and powerful tools to ensure perfect beat accuracy.” It does an incredible job at matching beats.

If you want super simple, you can try out DrDJ. But if you want to have some serious fun with your music…and your parties, try DeKstasy.

Download:here