Best professional audio recording software for mac

In both cases, the quality of these programs is very high and both will work with a wide assortment of audio hardware. All the features are there: It contains everything you need to produce music and seems very intuitive and easy to use. A lot of my producer and engineer friends use it, and they swear by it, citing its ease of use, sound quality, and simplicity with production.

There is nothing wrong with using Pro Tools, of course. All of the above are solid apps with unique feature sets and strengths, dedicated fan bases, and active support and development teams. Try them out and decide which combination of user experience and specific features works best for you. Parts of this post were contributed by Daniel Kimbrel and Jessica Josh. If you would like to submit a guest post, check out the guidelines here.

Daniel is a movie buff and freelance writer. He contributes to a number of music sites online. Jessica Josh is an Australian freelance writer and blogger.

Since she has been writing about weddings, fashion, and music. I help musicians and producers make a greater impact with their music by teaching them how to produce and engineer themselves. An acquaintance of mine chimed in with his answer, with some details about studios and such but there was one comment that infuriated me: Pro-Tools is not going to make your music sound any better. Ask yourself: Is it going to make the sound of your pre-amps any better?

And if you feed it garbage it will give you trash. Learn to clean up your low-end, reduce bleed in your drums and eliminate annoying resonant frequencies from your recordings. Get rid of muddiness in your low-mids, tame the harshness in your mix, and get rid of your boxy sounding drums. Learn where to add presence to your vocals, brilliance to your acoustic guitars, thickness to your keyboards or weight to your bass. These tips are broken down by instrument and help you fix your frequency problems with simple solutions that you can use right away.

Garageband Available for Mac OS only Garageband comes free with any Mac computer and is pretty legit for most recording needs.

Audio Recording Programs for Any Situation All of the above are solid apps with unique feature sets and strengths, dedicated fan bases, and active support and development teams. Happy recording! Image by: Shawn Econo Home Studio. Read more. Whats your audio issue? Buying Audio Equipment. Setting Up Your Home Studio. Learning to Record. Making Better Mixes.

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Running Live Sound. For instance, QuickTime lets you change the recording source — pick between the internal microphone and the system audio with SoundFlower. You can also change the Recording quality between High and Maximum. Once these are set, just hit the Record button. As the program records your voice, you can see the size of the recording file also. However, there is no option to pause audio recording , you can only stop it and start a new one.

QuickTime is the best Mac software for casual audio recording. It gets the job done — with minimum things at stake. Everything you record will be available in a single file. That having said, we would not recommend QuickTime for professionals. Audacity is a free and open source audio recording software for Mac. We use for recording audio for our YouTube channel. You have an option to choose the recording source we use it with Blue Yeti mic , recording channel type, audio type etc.

As you can see below, it does offer a wider range of control as well.

But, the best part about Audacity for Mac is that it comes along with a bunch of editing tools. In fact, Audacity is a digital audio editor , first, and recorder later. Unlike QuickTime, Audacity lets you perform basic audio editing tasks like editing. You will also find options like effects, voice generation, noise removal, and track-based management. In case you are into professional audio recording and editing, there is a wide variety of Audacity plug-ins to choose from. Another bright side is that you will be able to export the audio recording in almost any format. As we said, Audacity is made for professionals.

Did we say that Audacity is free to use? At least, you would not have to worry about paying a huge amount for your DAW. Simple Recorder is a truly simple solution for audio recording in Mac.

Unlike QuickTime and Audacity, which takes multiple mouse click to start the recording, Simple Recorder sits in the menu bar and can start the audio recording in just two clicks. Best solution when you want to take quick notes. You can select the source of recording from the drop-down menu. It also lets you set up the volume. In just a single button, Simple Recorder would start the recording process.

In the Preferences section, you can pick the recording format, Sample Rate, Channel etc. Simple Recorder is the best Mac audio recording app for the intermediate users. Unlike QuickTime, it offers a standard set of customization options. So, if you think you need somewhat control over recording, go for this.

Technically speaking, GarageBand is a digital audio workstation, not a digital audio recorder like QuickTime or a digital audio editor like Audacity. In simple words, if you are into recording audio for music production , GarageBand is one of the best choices in town. However, unlike Audacity, GarageBand has a smaller learning curve and is more stable.

It even has a dedicated mode for Voice, where you can also select the type of voice recording. For instance, it offers different options for recording Narration Voice and Bright Voice.

Just hit the Record button and you can do the exporting part later. GarageBand is the recommended choice for professionals out there. If you need the best quality, control as well as performance, you should go for this built-in tool. Although the UI is simple, learning GarageBand will surely help you as an audio professional. Piezo from Rogue Amoeba is a simple and wonderful audio recording software for podcasts. If you want to make some amazing podcast recordings with precision, you can count on Piezo. It is one of the best features for getting precise podcasts, you know. Settings in Piezo are very easy to manage.

That having said, it lets you change the Music Quality only. Piezo has set up some quality pre-sets for music, audio, spoken word etc. By default, the recordings will be saved in MP3, which is convenient for most people. Just as you can see, the interface is a bit unconventional.