Adding music or sound effects into your podcast on-the-fly is a great way to enhance the production of your show, but you’ll need a digital soundboard to pull off the magic!
Luckily, one of my favorite Mac app companies, Rogue Amoeba, just launched a new soundboard app called Farrago (… That’s a dumb name).
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The new app replaces Rogue Amoeba’s previous soundboard app, Soundboard (this name makes sense). I’d actually been using Soundboard for a few years but it had recently stopped receiving updates, so I’m thrilled that they decided to create an all-new app.
Farrago lets you create a digital soundboard and play music or effects to any output you’d like. It gives you great control of each effect thanks to trimming, volume-setting, color-coding, and other organizational features.
I did not hesitate to buy this app because it’s a modern replacement to the aforementioned Soundboard. I pump music and sound effects into my podcasts on-the-fly by using Rogue Amoeba’s other excellent Mac apps Loopback and Audio Hijack.
Between the powers of Farrago, Loopback, and Audio Hijack, Rogue Amoeba is the best company out there for podcasters who want to create a digital studio. Thanks to them, you don’t need multiple computers, a mixer, or any other traditional radio production products (besides a microphone, of course!).
If you need help setting up these apps to set up the digital podcasting studio of your dreams, I’m your guy! I consult on these apps and use them in practice every week.
Farrago is a must-buy if you’re looking for a soundboard app, but I do have one complaint. As of this writing Farrago does not have a “ducking” feature. A ducking button, commonly used in radio, lets you easily drop the volume of the audio file you’re playing so you can talk over it without being drown out by the music. This seems like a gaping hole in the feature line up, and I’ve already contacting Rogue Amoeba about this problem. Hopefully they’ll add it in a future update, especially because it was previously available in Soundboard.
Currently, the only solution for ducking in Farrago is setting “Volume B” on your file to around 30% and then —
while the file is currently set on “Volume A” — clicking “Volume B” when you want to duck your audio. It seems that the second volume level on each file is the new way to duck, but why not continue calling it ducking? This is a clunkier way of presenting the feature and I think it’s ducking dumb!
Farrago is $49, though right now there’s an introductory price of $39.
Farrago Soundboard For Mac Free
A new app from veteran Mac developer Rogue Amoeba is always a reason to celebrate1, but that’s even more the case when the app in question fills an actual need. The latest offering from the team is Farrago, an attractive and powerful soundboard app that is not only impressive in its own right, but also works in harmony with the company’s other audio apps, such as Audio Hijack and Loopback.
Farrago Soundboard Windows
For podcasters and live performers, Farrago provides a quick and easy way to have a library of sound effects at your fingertips. You can drag your clips into a grid, each of which is assigned a keyboard hot key; then, during your performance, you can trigger the sound clip with cursor or keyboard.2
Farrago Soundboard Mac
Farrago supports separate sets of sound clips, if you need to maintain different groups for different shows, and has a slew of customization options, including multiple volume levels per clip, fade-in and fade-out points, the ability to play a sound as a loop, and keyboard shortcuts to fade in or immediately stop all audio.
If you do happen to use a tool like Rogue Amoeba’s Loopback, it’s a pretty simple affair to mix microphone audio with Farrago, so that, for example, other people on a Skype call with you can hear both you and your sound clips.
Personally, Farrago is a lot more pleasant looking than the last tool I used for this purpose, which was simply QuickTime Player with a bunch of audio clips lined up and routed through Loopback.
There are other soundboard apps that have done what Farrago does, but probably the chief contender, Ambrosia’s Soundboard, hasn’t been updated in almost 5 years. And Farrago benefits from Rogue Amoeba’s long experience with developing audio applications.
You can grab a free, fully functional download of Farrago from Rogue Amoeba’s site, though it will degrade the audio after 20 plays per launch. A license will currently run you $39, a discount on the eventual $49 full price.
- Full disclosure: Rogue Amoeba’s CEO Paul Kafasis is a longtime friend. ↩
- Finally, I’ll be able to create the Morning Zoo-style podcast of my dreams. ↩
[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors. You can find him on Twitter at @dmoren or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His latest novel, The Aleph Extraction, is out now and available in fine book stores everywhere, so be sure to pick up a copy.]
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