It has an amazing breadth of abilities, combining serious power with delightful simplicity, at an astonishingly low price. To use it is to love it.Īs of mid-January 2007, Amadeus comes in two versions. The program I’ve been using all this time, properly called Amadeus II, is a Carbon program. The current version of Amadeus II (3.8.7) runs natively under Mac OS X, and also works fine under Mac OS 9.2. (If you’re still reveling in the retro experience, you can even obtain an earlier, unsupported version that runs under Mac OS 8.6.) The “II,” by the way, was added to the name years ago, when the original Amadeus, which could run on a 68K Macintosh, was updated to version 2.0 and became PowerPC-only.Īmadeus II, however, runs under Rosetta on an Intel-based Mac. The developer recognized that an Intel-native incarnation was desirable, and took the opportunity to update the program to a Cocoa interface. This update has been released as Amadeus Pro, a universal binary with a somewhat broader feature set than its predecessor. Past and Present - My affection for Amadeus is intimately bound up with how I came to start using it and the sorts of thing I’ve done with it over the years. Back in the days before Mac OS X, in December 2000, I looked sadly at my massive collection of cassette tapes, thought about all those little magnetic particles silently hydrolyzing or falling off or whatever evil deteriorative activity they were indulging in, and resolved to transfer all this music into a digital format before it evaporated forever. My working method began with a play-through of the cassette, recording it onto the computer as an AIFF file, using a wonderful piece of freeware called Coaster. This turned each entire side of the cassette into a single sound file. (I use the word “song” loosely, in the way that iTunes does on an audio CD these would be called “tracks,” but the word “track” has another usage in Amadeus Pro, similar to its use in GarageBand or iMovie, so I’m deliberately avoiding ambiguity.) But what I wanted were multiple sound files containing individual songs, and that’s where Amadeus entered the story. So, I opened the file using Amadeus, which showed me the waveforms of the right and left stereo channels, along with an overview of the entire file. I could use the overview to help navigate. I could zoom in and out to see waveform details or to get the larger picture. I could click to start playing at a certain point, or play a selected region. I could insert a bookmark designating a point of interest in the file, and navigate to it easily later on. And of course I could cut and paste a selected section of the waveform. Thus, it was simple for me to work my way through the file, finding the start and end of each individual song on the tape, and marking those points. Then later I would use those bookmarks to select one song at a time, along with a little of the surrounding silence, and copy and save that selection as an individual song file.ĭoubtless that sounds extremely simple – as, indeed, it was. What I didn’t fully appreciate at the time, though, is that it was simple in part because Amadeus made it simple. Over the years since then I’ve used many other sound-editing programs, but none that lets me interact so directly and simply with a waveform.
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