Posted by paxswill 
Category: Here’s a good portion of the applications I use on a day to day basis. Hopefully someone finds something they didn’t know about and I’ve helped them out.
First up are my media apps. Music, Photos, Movies, it’s all here.
The biggie is iTunes. I manage all of my music and movies on there, but there’s some tricks I take advantage of. My internal laptop drive is only 250GB, with 160GB of it for OS X. My movies on the other hand, take up almost 100GB. So, I keep my movies on an external terabyte drive, and have a thing called a symbolic link connecting the “Movies” folder in the iTunes Library to the Movies folder on my external drive. Other things special to my iTunes is the original Magnetosphere visualizer, which is what the newest iTunes visualizer was based on. Looks cooler in my opinion.
Related to iTunes is Last.fm, which keeps a nice little log of what I’m listening to, and also suggests new stuff to me.
PandoraBoy is a standalone Pandora client that has support for the Apple Remote, so it can be controlled from across the room
I use VLC and Mplayer to play esoteric media files. Mplayer for OS X is old and beta, but works well enough. Related to those is Perian, which is a driver pack for Quicktime. Another driver pack that gets a lot of use from me are the Windows Media Components for Quicktime.
To rip DVDs, I use a two step process of first removing the copy protection with MacTheRipper (torrent the latest beta, as charging for open source is BS), the encoding with a custom build of Handbrake that uses the Quicktime audio encoder and optimizations for my machine only.
Synergy is a cool little app I got that puts a little overlay of the track name whenever a new track starts in iTunes.
I also have the latest version of iLife, so there’s iWeb, iPhoto, iMovie, and iDVD on here. Note a lack of Garageband, which I don’t use at all, and takes up a load of space on a hard drive. Instead of Garageband, I use Audacity for my audio editing needs. It’s small, and has some extra things I like (generating sine tones for one).
Delicious Library 2 is a kinda cool app, though I still haven’t gotten around to adding my books into it as I just got it recently.
Tags: Mac —
