The Toolbox

Instead of a rant, today I thought I would share some of my favourite free resources and tools for sound post. Most of them are for the Macintosh platform, but there may be some Windows versions.

So, in no particular order, here are five of them:

1. North Pole by Prosoniq
An RTAS pole filter plug-in with all parameters fully automatable. This one allows you to seriously mangle your sounds (if that's what you need). Right now, it only works on PPC Macs, but it will come out as an RTAS/AudioUnit version for Intel Macs in a few months.

2. Timecode Calculator by Netmedia
A small app for, well, making timecode calculations. It supports all common formats, including HD (23.796 fps) and film formats (feet and frames). Especially cool is the widget version.

3. LameBrain
Although this LAME-based MP3 encoder seems to be abandoned by its developer, it still works really well for batch encoding. It's reasonably small and fast, and it allows for Variable Bit Rate encoding.

4. ProTools Prefs & Database Helper by Jean-Charles Deshaies
If ProTools is acting up on you and just being a general PITA, you can use this to trash all the different pref and database files without having to go look for them in each folder. It also allows you to back up your prefs when everything is going great with PT, so you can restore them after you have deleted the corrupted ones.

5. Teleport by Abyssoft
An amazing app that lets you control several Macs with just one keyboard and mouse. Unlike KVM switchers, this lets you work as if you had several displays instead of computers: you just move the cursor across the screens.

So, there you go. Enjoy!