Farrago

Give your podcasts a professional touch

$49 From Rogue Amoeba, rogueamoeba.com Needs OS X 10.10 or later

Whether you produce podcasts, live theatre or present radio shows, Farrago will play audio clips at the tap of a key.

Clips are displayed as tiles in Farrago’s main window. They can be organized in sets and each set can have up to 80 clips. Each clip can be named and have a color and keyboard shortcut assigned to it. Forty keys are assigned as keyboard shortcuts and each can be modified using the Option key, meaning that all 80 clips in a set can have their own keyboard trigger. In addition, you can set a keyboard shortcut to pull Farrago to the front — to avoid conflicts, playback shortcuts only work when Farrago is the frontmost app. Clips can be played simultaneously by pressing multiple keys or by selecting them and pressing Return.

You can add notes to clips, and configure them to fade in or out, loop or make all other clips stop when they’re triggered.

If you record podcasts with other people in remote locations, you can use Rogue Amoeba’s Loopback to route Farrago audio through Skype so everyone can hear it. For recording podcasts, Farrago can be routed through the same company’s Audio Hijack.

Farrago couldn’t be easier to use. You get started with the 25 sample clips. Their shortcuts, along with their name and a waveform representation of the audio, are displayed on the face of their tile. Press the relevant key and the clip plays. Press again and it stops. Or press the spacebar to pause.

To add new clips, click on the set you want to add the sound clip to, navigate to the clip in the Finder, drag it onto Farrago’s main window and drop it onto the grid slot with the keyboard shortcut you want to use. To change its keyboard shortcut, just drag it to a different part of the window. Clips can be organized by dragging them around the window within a set and color coding them as required. And they’re stored in Farrago itself, meaning if there’s a problem accessing the original it won’t affect playback.

Adding notes, and adjusting clip settings is done in the Inspector. If you want to see a clip’s notes in the main window, choose the list view which, instead of tiling clips, lists them vertically with notes to their right.

the bottom line. Farrago is a great way to incorporate jingles into your podcast or performance.

Each audio clip is represented by a tile that’s triggered by a keyboard shortcut.

Each set can have up to 80 clips, which you can arrange by dragging them onto slots and color coding them.