My list is gonna be heavily Mac focused since that’s the computer I’m on most of the time that I’m not at work
Keka - a nice little archive utility that’s more versatile than macOS’s built in one
Audio Hijack - an absolute Swiss army knife of a recording utility, I found it incredibly useful when I was recording podcast episodes on a regular basis. Used it to record my own track in lossless quality, and a recording of the full call in mp3 to use as a backup and sync track. It does transcription now too, apparently!
Calibre - it’s not pretty but it holds my collection of ebooks and puts them on whatever device I want them to live on. This one’s available for pretty much any computer OS.
Forecast - another podcast specific utility, but this tool was indispensable for putting chapters into the file, along with associating them with links and chapter images
IINA - a nice looking video player that’s played everything I’ve thrown at it, typically updates to use native macOS video stuff faster than VLC does
Mela - have seen this mentioned before, so seconding that recommendation. I made a similar jump from Paprika and really love the cooking view and importing experience in Mela
Soundsource - a way to manage audio devices that’s a bit more useful than the built in one. I mostly use it to apply EQ to my output devices and make my desk speakers sound better. I wrote about it here if anyone’s interested.
XLD - made extensive use of this ripping my CD collection recently, was able to set it up and mostly just let it do it’s thing as I just chucked in new CDs once the previous one finished.
iTerm2 - I spend a bit of time in the terminal. This terminal is a little nicer to use and easier to customise than the built in
I’ve been using this for a while now and it’s so nice. I’ve been trying to find something comparable for iOS and OutPlayer is the closest but it’s not quite the same.
For anyone that works with images or PDF’s on Mac. This is more to highlight a feature I didn’t know about until somewhat recently, but the “Quick Actions” on Mac’s OS are really handy.
Great for a quick rotate, bringing down file sizes, making PDFs or saving out image files from PSDs without having to open them.
I gave Soundsource a try today as well as reinstalled Airfoil and unfortunately the both of them made streaming to AirPlay devices (my only one being a 2012 AirPort Express downgraded to the 7.6.9 firmware) much too hard. My APX wasn’t visible in the Soundsource menu unless I selected it from the system prefs, and streaming through Airfoil added even more latency than AirPlay 1 makes you deal with natively (worth it though for lossless streaming).
Also, the one problem I was hoping these could address just doesn’t seem to be possible the way Apple have implemented AirPlay: sometimes I stream from a FF tab open to bandcamp or yt or 8beats or some other site that plays music. I want to be able to selectively stream only that tab to my stereo and have everything else pipe through my laptop’s speakers. It doesn’t seem to be possible, though!
I just downloaded the app, subscribed to the insert credit podcast, downloaded the latest episode and hit play in less time than it sometimes takes me to find and play the latest episode on spotify.
Can someone help me out:
Without high speed internet, it seems nearly impossible to easily transfer photos from iOS to my PC. USB 2.0 speeds aside, the usb transfer doesn’t even work and just crashes or is inaccessible to begin with.
Fuck this cloud era, I have all my other stuff on physical storage because I live off grid, my phone is my camera, and they intentionally make it so hard to do the simplest thing: get photos off my phone onto my own storage! My dad is such an Apple-brain, he sees no problem with all this, because he has a mac! But I haven’t been able to organize my photos since the PSP days!
Do you at least have local network between your iphone and your pc?
You can set up a smb shared folder, and then the “Files” app on your phone can browse to and connect to it. You can select photos from the photos app and in the “share” action there should be “Save to Files”, and you can then go to that shared folder.
Or if you have a USB drive and the appropriate cable, you can just do it locally via that. The usb drive should show up in the Files app on the Browse page.
No home network I live off of mobile network, in a van. IMO it would be kind of wild to set up a portable router in here. I’ve considered it and even have a shopping list set aside for one, but I’m avoiding it.
Here’s the main thing:
I would really prefer the interface to be on my PC rather than looking at my phone screen to manage photos.
The closest I have to this is Zotero, a bibliographic source manager. Browser integration is easy for collecting sources (usually will pull info from a database entry for books or journals; often works with website articles too), it syncs really well across computers, I can enter in ISBNs to get book information, and I can keep note on sources in the program. Generating bibliographic entries is pretty easy too; compared to what my students usually use, it’s so much more reliable, and all I have to correct is occasional capitalization errors in titles.
Thought I should pass on for anyone who was thinking of picking up something from Rogue Amoeba, they’re having a 22nd birthday event where you can get 22% off until October 7 with the code TWENTYTWO.
What is the preferred method of downloading the audio from YouTube videos these days? Audio Hijack looks like it will do the trick but will be spendy for something I will use infrequently.
How comfortable are you with using the command line?
I use yt-dlp and it’s working great. While you can fiddle to your heart’s content it just takes one line to download the audio of a youtube video or even the audio of a full playlist.
yt-dlp.exe “VIDEO_URL” -f bestaudio[ext=m4a]
The setup consisted of downloading the software and ffmpeg and then it just worked™
