JoeSoft Hear, a sound enhancing experience for analogue output
PRODUCT DATA
Pros: Can make a cheap speaker set connected to your Mac sound like a home entertainment system, fun to play with, lets you control sound level and DSP on/off for every open application.
Contras: No control over which applications you don't want Hear to interfere with
Link: http://www.joesoft.com
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by: Erik Vlietinck - Last Updated: Thu 17 July 2008
Hear changes your sound output in such ways that it may prove addictive, but always fun.
Hear is JoeSoft’s newest toy for Mac users, and yes you can spend a couple of days playing with it. Hear is a small application that installs a daemon in your system. It’s fun and it actually can make a bad pair of speakers or headphones sound much better, but it only works with the analogue output of your Mac.
Hear has a black nice-looking interface with several tabs that allow you to change the way sound goes to your Mac’s mini-jacks. There are a large number of presets to chose from, ranging from spoken word over small studio to large hall. But you can also change (and save them as a preset) yourself the individual parameters, and these are what make Hear such a nice toy to play with.
Relax and Hear
For example, if you want to add bass, you can either add bass in the equalizer tab, but you can also “make” a virtual subwoofer. Spaces can be made and broken. A radio reporter can be made to sound as if he had his head stick in the mud, in a shoebox, or as if he was standing in a cathedral. The sounds can be changed in an exaggerated or subtle manner.
There even is a tab that will change music to sound more or less the same way relaxation or concentration tapes sound --Pzizz comes to mind.
The nicest part about all of Hear’s features is that it drives any type of speaker or headphones connected to the mini jacks of your mac. So, in order to boost bass using Hear’s Subwoofer or make it sound like you’re listening to a 5-speaker home entertainment system, you don’t need to buy extra hardware. Hear will do --up to a point, of course.
When you uninstall Hear --it’s very easy to do, right from within the application-- you’ll notice there’s a text file in the Trash that has a list of applications the daemon won’t interfere with. Unfortunately, there are no instructions to edit the list so you can set up your own exclusions, and it’s also unclear where the file resides on your system, or whether it actually disables Hear when these applications are started.
Apart from those “quirks”, Hear is a program that’s bound to give you many hours of fun!
