Take Control of Audio Hijack

Find sound advice for recording anything on your Mac!

Updated June 9, 2016

Learn how to use Rogue Amoeba's Audio Hijack 3 to capture and enhance any audio playing on a Mac. Audio expert Kirk McElhearn provides instructions for setting up common scenarios -- recording audio playing in Safari, capturing Skype and FaceTime calls, digitizing your old LPs, extracting audio from concert DVDs, and working with mics and mixers, among much else. Kirk also helps you edit recordings in Rogue Amoeba's Fission audio editor.

You'll learn how to pipe sound through Audio Hijack to enhance its quality without recording. For example, by boosting the volume or tweaking the bass -- movies on Netflix never sounded better!

You'll also discover special features such as reusable sessions, recording to more than one file (and format) at once, scheduling recordings, time shifting during live playback, effects like ducking and panning, adding automatic metadata before recording, and more.

The Fission chapter has directions for trimming, cropping, adding, replacing, splitting, and fading audio. It also explains how to turn an audio file into a ringtone and -- podcasters and educators take note! -- how to make a chapterized AAC file.

This book was created in collaboration with Rogue Amoeba, who worked with us to make this book more accurate, more detailed, and just plain better.

As far as recording goes, you'll find help with:

• Recording literally any audio played on your Mac.
• Setting up reusable sessions with Audio Hijack's Audio Grid interface.
• Scheduling when your Mac should record something automatically.
• Recording from a mic. Or two mics. Or a mixer. Or a food processor.
• Capturing a chat from Skype, FaceTime, and other voice-over-IP apps.
• Checking volume levels before you record.
• Ducking one audio source when a second source kicks in.
• Digitizing an LP or cassette, while reducing hiss and noise.
• Breaking a digitized album into separate songs.
• Recording to multiple files and formats.
• Finding your recordings in Audio Hijack and the Finder.

If you're interested in enhancing your aural experience, you'll find help with:

• Enhancing audio while you listen to it. For example, your little laptop's speakers might not provide enough oomph for an action thriller's soundtrack, but with Audio Hijack you can boost that sound and enjoy the flick.
• Piping audio around your house while you listen in creative ways: Rdio might not be able to use AirPlay to send music to your AirPort Express, but Audio Hijack can.
• Time shifting live audio while you listen. If you've ever used a TiVo, you know what this means: You're listening to a live stream, but you can't pay attention continuously. Even though it's live, you want to pause and resume, or go back a few seconds or jump ahead (if there's anything to jump ahead to).

Lastly, you'll learn how to use Fission to polish your recordings. You can:

• Trim unwanted bits.
• Insert one audio file into another.
• Fade in or out from silence.
• Adjust a recording's volume.
• Create a ringtone or alert noise.
• Make a chapterized AAC file.
• Batch convert nearly any audio file to MP3, AAC, Apple Lossless, FLAC, AIFF, or WAV format.