Media tools
Players
With windows, I have about 6 media players, I thought it would be at least as bad on the Mac, but I was wrong. You can even play DVDs without having to install a paid for program. Quicktime and iDVD come as standard. My favorite on Windows is Real Alternative which uses Media Player Classic, but that’s not available on OS X.
It is worth installing ‘Perin‘ for Quicktime, which enables DivX and others with Quicktime.
For Windows media, Flip4Mac is the MS recommended option.
VLC
Covered in the cross-platform section, but if you have a problem with it crashing after 5-10 seconds, try deleting the VLC preferences folder in ~/Library/Preferences/.
Ripping/Encoding
Doom9 produced a guide to backing up your DVDs.
Handbrake seems to be the default DVD to MPEG4 ripper, or Mac The Ripper for harder to open DVDs.
FFmpegX is a Mac OS X graphic user interface designed to easily operate more than 20 powerful Unix open-source video and audio processing tools including ffmpeg the “hyper fast video and audio encoder.
iSquint, aptly named converter for showing things on iPod (or TV) scales.
iTunes
iTunes comes as part of OSX, but transfering a music library is not as easy as you might imagine. This is the basic process I had to follow:
- Ratings are lost, if you use these, make sure that just before trasnfer you create manual playlists (not smart ones) of each rating.
- Playcounts are lost, no idea how to get around that.
- Make sure all your files are DRM less (JHymn helps for that).
- Move the entire iTunes music directory over to the new computer, including library XML files.
- Open the new (blank) version of iTunes, and set it’s libary location to the music directory.
- Open the library XML file, and do a search and replace on the file locations so they match the new location.
- “Import” the library, selecting the library XML file you just edited.
- Use the ratings playlists to re-apply your ratings to the songs.
I will also have a look at this little application: syncOtunes, which might make it easier.
iPhoto
iPhoto seems pretty good for dealing with all your pics, but if you organise more than just your own pics, managing more than one library is really useful: iPhoto manager.
Catalogue
This looks interesting - catalogue your DVDs etc by scanning the labels with iSight: Delicious-monster.
Recording audio
Most useful for conversations, Call recorder looks like an easy to use method. Daring Fireball recommends recording conversations individually with something like Sound Studio and putting them together afterwards. The results are good from his talkshow.
For more general recording, use Soundflower to get internal sound to appear as an input in something like Audacity.
Remote control of iTunes
Via your iPhone or iPod touch, this program Signal sets up a little server you can log into with Safari.