Product Reviews

If your Internet radio programmes are often interrupted by family obligations, or you want to record an incoming Skype phone call - with the other party's permission, of course - then WireTap Studio ought to be welcome relief in the face of distraction. It can record from two sources to a single file, regardless of the audio's format or its source - be it an application, a microphone or other input device or all Mac audio.

The controller window can be left at the desktop's edge until needed. Prior to recording, the LivePreview button lets you hear the quality of your chosen preset, though older Macs may struggle to maintain sync as our G4 did when recording audio from a DVD. Still, it's a neat implementation to prevent finding out too late that the wrong settings were chosen. Hit the record button and the window shows the current duration and disk space used.

Tucked away in the application preferences are options for naming recordings with prefixes, suffixes and source name, though a name can be assigned manually after recording. Recordings are added to the library and opened in the integrated editor.

The editor's controls prove easy to use, with a slider on the left controlling normalisation, and others underneath the time line for duration and position of fade in and out. The basic remove hum and hiss features merely apply Apple's Audio Units, with more precise tuning - and application of other effects - possible in the

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effects inspector. There's also a built-in tag editor for MP3 and AAC files, avoiding unnecessary trips into iTunes.

Recording sessions will appeal to regular Internet radio listeners, with the ability to schedule by time and date, and to create recurring schedules on specific days or dates of the week or month. Connection speed permitting, recordings can be made concurrently. However, it's wise to use an additional web browser to avoid capturing unwanted browser sounds.

Actions can be run before and after recording to open an address in a browser or media player, and applications can be exited to help save bandwidth. But our PowerBook ignored WireTap's wake and sleep preference, thus losing a schedule.

While every session can have its own description, there's no option to include this in the recording's name, so it has to be manually added to the prefix.

The library window takes a visual cue from iLife, with playback controls and an integrated Spotlight search in the toolbar, sources listed on the left and the selected source's contents on the right. Groups offer some organisation but they have one significant difference compared to iTunes' playlists - items deleted from a group are also removed from the library, although there's a warning before this happens.

Buttons across the bottom of the window send a selection to one of several destinations, including direct to an iPod without having to go through iTunes. Strangely though we could not send an AIFF file to an iPod classic; WireTap complained that it was incompatible.

One more simple but notable feature is iCal integration - it proves valuable since clicking columns in the session window does not sort it.

WireTap's presentation is clean, and the application is easy to get to grips with. Most of our complaints are minor issues, the problem with automatic waking and sleeping being the most significant. The modest audio editor may prove sufficient for most home users too - and it can open files from outside WireTap's library.