By Dan Moren

Farrago is a powerful soundboard for podcasters, live performers

A new app from veteran Mac developer Rogue Amoeba is always a reason to celebrate, 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.

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.

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.

[Dan Moren is the official Dan 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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