Back in August, we mentioned we were working on a top-secret project with new hire Grant Farr. It’s been a long haul, but today we’re thrilled to be able to reveal the fruits of that work:

This is Piezo, our charmingly simple audio recorder. With Piezo, getting started recording audio on your Mac is a snap. Seconds after you open it up, you’ll be ready to record audio from any application. Piezo requires almost no configuration, and it’s a blast to use, with beautiful graphics and thoughtful interactions.

Using Piezo, you can record from almost any app on your Mac. Whether it’s web streams in Safari or music from services like Spotify and Rdio, you can record it with Piezo. Just select the desired source and press record to capture its audio. When needed, straightforward settings for recording name and format are also available. Piezo can even capture audio from audio devices. Hook up a microphone like a standard Apple iPhone headset, and you can record your own audio right into your Mac.

Raisons D’etre

Piezo exists to bring audio recording to the millions of customers in the Mac App Store. That’s right: Piezo marks the first Rogue Amoeba app available in the Mac App Store, and you can get it right now.

Due to the many restrictions Apple imposes, it’s taken us almost a year to get an app in the Mac App Store. Our award-winning recording tool Audio Hijack Pro has many features which rely on deep integration with Mac OS X, but Apple’s restrictions disallow this, preventing Audio Hijack Pro from appearing in the App Store. The streamlined Piezo, however, has been approved by Apple’s review team. This allows us to bring the power of recording any app to a wider audience¹.

In the process of making Piezo, we also realized it gave us a chance to simplify audio recording. While Audio Hijack Pro is incredibly powerful, it does have a bit of a learning curve. For truly simple recording, Piezo can’t be beat.

As part of that, we worked incredibly hard on Piezo’s interface, giving it an alluring retro-modern feel. Christa really got to sink her teeth into all the artwork, while Grant had fun with some new interactions like the time display. We’re delighted with the way Piezo looks, and we know you’ll love using it.

That’s a Wrap

By now, we hope you’re ready to try out Piezo. It’s cute and fun, and in addition to being easy to use, it’s easy on the wallet. How easy? Right now, Piezo costs an amazingly low $10.

Piezo is available for Mac OS X 10.6 and higher. As noted, Piezo is our very first Mac App Store app, which means you can purchase and download right through Apple’s App Store. Of course, we’ll always sell it directly as well. Whichever way you choose to buy, you can download Piezo first to take it for a test drive.

We think you’re going to love Piezo. If you have any questions or feedback, contact us directly. Otherwise, just enjoy!

Footnotes:

1. As far as our other apps making their way into the App Store, we don’t really have anything new to say right now. We’ll always sell our software directly, alongside any Mac App Store versions, so there should never be any concern when considering a purchase. ↩

Do you own a Boxee Box? If so, you’re in luck, as it’s the newest device we’ve tested with Airfoil, and it works just great to receive audio from your Mac or PC. Sending audio to the Boxee Box didn’t actually require any updates to Airfoil, nor even a download of Airfoil Speakers. This compatibility is available with a simple update to the Boxee Box’s firmware.

The Boxee Box: No Stacking!

Getting AirPlay Receiving Set Up

When it arrived, our Boxee Box had some very old firmware. Updating this was easy though, with the built-in updater found in Settings. Once the new firmware (version 1.2) was installed, AirPlay receiving needed to be activated. This can done by going to the Settings, selecting Network, then choosing the Servers settings. The last item there is called (somewhat-misleadingly) Enable streaming from iOS devices. Once you turn this on, you’ll see Boxee appear in Airfoil:

Airfoil sending MOG’s audio to the Boxee Box.

The Result

The most important result of course is that, audio from your Mac or Windows machine flows through Airfoil and out to the Boxee Box. This works great, and enables you to send any audio from your computer. There are a couple drawbacks, however.

First and foremost, the Boxee Box does not play audio in sync with other outputs. If you just want to send from a Mac or PC to Boxee, great. But you won’t be able to include Boxee in a multi-output system if you want everything in sync.

As well, there aren’t a lot of frills here, however. When Airfoil sends audio out, we pass along metadata from supported sources (on Mac and Windows). For instance, here’s what the AppleTV shows when receiving audio from Spotify:

Airfoil sending Spotify’s audio to the AppleTV

Unfortunately, with the Boxee Box’s current setup, you’ll get only a simple screensaver:

Airfoil sending Spotify’s audio to the Boxee Box

That said, the audio plays just fine, so it’s a promising start. If you’ve got a Boxee Box, just turn on AirPlay receiving, and you’ll be able to send it any audio from your Mac or PC using Airfoil!

It’s been something of a hiring whirlwind here at Rogue Amoeba, with the recent additions of Grant Farr and Jose Vazquez. Today, we’ve got yet another new face, in the form of Ed Wynne. Eagle-eyed readers will recognize Ed’s name from our About boxes, as Ed’s done a good deal of contract work for Rogue Amoeba over the years. He’s one of the brains behind the hijacker, which powers the audio capture used in Airfoil, Audio Hijack Pro, and Nicecast. Now, we’ve brought him on full-time to help us hack away.

You can learn all about Ed on our Staff page. He handles backend work (like the aforementioned hijacker), so you won’t see the results of his work directly. However, his code will continue to find its way into almost all of our products. We’re thrilled to have him on board.

Over at Businessweek, there’s a fascinating look inside Apple, focused on Senior Vice President of iOS Software Scott Forstall. There are lots of interesting bits, but perhaps the one which stuck out the most was this:

Before the introduction of the iPhone, Forstall supported Jobs’s view that Apple didn’t need to create an ecosystem of third-party developers. Back then they figured the device would stand out for combining a phone with an iPod plus a superfast browser. For the most popular activities—watching YouTube videos, for example—Forstall’s team would simply partner with market leaders such as Google to create apps built specifically for the iPhone.

With as far as Apple’s come in just 4 years, it would be easy to be misled into the idea that they planned every step along the way.

Two months ago, we introduced our then-newest hire Grant Farr. Today, we’re adding to the Rogue Amoeba family again! Jose Vazquez is the newest face on our Staff page, joining us as a Mac Software Engineer.

Over the summer, Jose did contract work on Fission. Now, he’s expanding that work as his first assignment with the company, and building on some of the work Grant did previously as well. We hope to have more information to share on Fission in the future, but for now, we’ll just welcome Jose aboard!