Track Snippets 16.0 Released

April 20, 2023

Some major changes at Apple recently threatened to wipe out Track Snippets! The bad news is that the app was temporarily removed from the Mac App Store, but the good news is that it will soon be back. Out here in the wild, we're still going strong.

This update fixes all reported bugs, and several improvements have also been made, most of which are of the "more felt than seen" variety — things like proper handling of multiple project booting, project crash recovery, and recent projects management.

A security update to our server caused authorisation issues which have also been fixed. Unfortunately, because that issue exists in previous versions of the app, a notification of this update will not appear to existing users, so we'll be sending out an email to those of you who purchased from our store to make sure you are notified of the update.

Don't forget, licensed users can submit feature requests at any time.

Please download the update from the Track Snippets software page.

Enjoy!
Aaron

PDF Bookmaker Update 1.7.0

November 11, 2021

This update fixes some reported bugs and adds a very useful new feature, namely the ability to scale and reposition the content of all the pages of a project, with different settings for left-facing and right-facing pages. This way, if your source files don't have correct margins, you can simply adjust the size and placement of the page content in your project without having to modify the source files.

Please download the update from the PDF bookmaker product page.

Stay well everyone,
Aaron

PDF Bookmaker Update 1.6.1

December 15, 2020

I was recently contacted by an author who reported several problems occurring with the latest version of OSX. He also requested a feature: could the title and/or the author's name be optionally printed along with the page numbering? As my loyal readers know (both of you), I normally ask to be paid for adding features, but if the idea is good enough and easy enough to implement, I'll do it for free. This was one of those rarer latter cases. I'm happy to release this update which fixes problems on MacOS and makes the app even more useful for everyone. Please download the update from the PDF bookmaker product page.

Stay well everyone,
Aaron

Track Snippets Update 15.0.1

August 07, 2019

Four years since its initial release, Track Snippets remains the undefeated one of a kind champion in the handy-little-utility-for-making-preview-snips-of-audio-tracks challenger class. This update fixes all reported bugs and gets an overhaul for compatibility in future OS versions, now with a 64-bit build, support for Retina / HiDPI displays, and a new playback engine.

Licensed users can submit feature requests at any time.

Please download the update from the Track Snippets software page.

Enjoy!
Aaron

PDF Bookmaker 1.5.0

July 20, 2019

It's been five years since PDF Bookmaker hit the stage. Version 1.5.0 is the first to be compiled as a 64-bit application with support for Retnia / HiDPI displays which have since become more or less standard. Several reported bugs have been fixed, mostly minor issues, the most serious of which was the handling of document names with non-Latin characters. Other improvements include control of per-document margin sizes and the ability to preview individual documents. This is a big help if you are using multiple print services which require different margin sizes for your source document. Instead of having to go back and change all your source files, you can use multiple PDF Bookmaker projects to change the margin sizes of your combined files.

The update is available for download from the PDF bookmaker software page. The Mac App Store version is under review by Apple, and will appear later on the Mac App Store. Licensed users can submit feature requests at any time.

Regards,
Aaron

Discontinued Apps

May 04, 2019

As of April 2019, Ravio and Personal Group Emailer have been discontinued. Both of these internet applications were developed about a decade ago, when http access and email protocols were much simpler than they are today.

Changes to the Mac OS and stricter security requirements have made Ravio difficult to maintain, and mobile platforms have largely taken over the tasks which Ravio offered to the desktop world. For these reasons Ravio will no longer be developed.

The mobile trend towards use of cloud services and IMAP email protocols have rendered POP-email applications like Personal Group Emailer relatively useless for the majority of users. Stricter ISP regulations on sending emails also made it difficult to use the application even with POP accounts. Services like MailChimp have taken over these tasks, allowing most users to set up mailing services at no cost. Therefore Personal Group Emailer will no longer be developed.

It is impossible to predict how internet protocols will develop in the years to come. Therefore it is not out of the question that these projects may be resurrected at some future point, however unlikely that may seem at the present moment.

Users of PDF Bookmaker and Track Snippets — have no fear. These more recently developed applications deal with PDF and audio formats which are much more stable entities than internet protocols, so these applications will continue into the foreseeable future.

Best Regards,
Aaron

PDF Bookmaker Update 1.4.9

July 26, 2017

This update fixes a few bugs concerning list behaviour and page number management.

Previously when clicking in the list of imported PDFs, if clicking in a selection triangle, the selected rows in the list would increase as in multiple-selection list behaviour, which is not what one would normally expect to happen. This has been changed to single-item selection behaviour.

When hiding page numbers, or forcing them to the bottom of the page for given pages, previously the popup-menu would sometimes not provide the option to undo that behaviour (to show the number or to display it at the top of the page). This has been fixed in version 1.4.9

The update is available here immediately for download from the PDF bookmaker software page. The Mac App Store version is under review by Apple, which can take up to several weeks, so it will appear later on the Mac App Store. Licensed users can submit feature requests at any time.

Regards,
Aaron

Track Snippets Update 1.0.4

December 27, 2016

This update fixes a problem with audio source files having non-Latin characters in the file name. Previously such files could cause Track Snippets to crash.

Licensed users can login to download the update for free from the tracksnippets software page. To try out the software before buying, simply create an account, and then go to the tracksnippets software page to download free of charge.

Regards,
Aaron

Personal Group Emailer: vCard support and new features

December 12, 2015

  

From time to time I have an opportunity to work with a customer who requests a new feature for my software. Last month I received a request from a customer in Germany who had previously been using a competitor's mailing app and had switched to PGE. He told me first that PGE was a better app (thank you!), but he missed the ability to include other data from Apple Contacts beyond a name and an email, specifically the home and work variations on the email, address, telephone, and also the contact's birthday.

When I developed PGE, I had decided on accessing only the Contact name and email to keep things simple, and because PGE is a cross-platform application which needs to function the same way on both Mac and Windows. If I accessed information from Apple Contacts, I would then need some way for Windows users to do the same (because I prefer to have the same functionality on both platforms). Apple has integrated their Contacts application at the system level, so that it is easy to get information from the Contacts application. On Windows, this situation does not exist, so using PGE on Windows has always required importing text files. Up to now these have been required as .csv or .tsv format, with only names and emails in the file.

In order to give the customer what was needed, I required a solution that would behave the same way on both platforms. This solution turned out to be the vCard format. I found that the contacts API on Mac OS already included a representation of any contact in vCard format. In other words, this change is totally transparent for Mac users. The vCard is also already supported as an import/export format in all major Windows contacts applications, so for Windows users this change also is natural and in many cases makes transfer of contacts data easier. In this way I was able to restructure the way contacts are imported into PGE without any drawbacks for any users, allowing access to all the information the customer required on either platform. The import button on the Recipients page now shows vCards as the first option along with the text files which will continue to be supported.

  

So now in addition to inserting the contact's name and email into a message as a data string, you can also insert the following:

  

The birthday is interesting because its representation as a date depends on your location and language as selected in your computer's System Preferences. PGE now allows you to insert short, medium, and long variations of the birthday value.

A further improvement resulting from this change is the ability to select from multiple emails for a given contact, when more than one email address is available. When you import a contact from a group, PGE selects the first email it finds in the vCard representation as the default. Other available emails (up to 3 per contact) are then available as selection items in the Recipient List.

  

A few other improvements include the insertion of these new data strings as test values, as well as indications of attachments in message preview windows.

Users can make feature requests at any time using the menu item which exists for that purpose. A special thanks of course goes to the customer in Germany who requested these improvements. By supporting my work and collaborating with me to test beta versions, you have helped to make the software better!

PGE documentation has been updated to reflect all these improvements. Please go to the Personal Group Emailer software page to download the update.

Regards,
Aaron

Ravio Update 1.18.290

November 29, 2015

If you use a MacBook or a desktop Mac for any kind of internet media, Ravio is for you. It gives you a very convenient way to access all your podcasts, videos, iTunes library, streaming radio stations, and much more, without all the hassle and clunkiness of a browser and multiple apps. Ravio does things no other app does, like automate complicated and tedious web navigation to get you where you want to go online, fast.

RSS searching and previewing has been enhanced in this Ravio update.

For all you loyal Mac classic users who remain in the Snow Leopard world, we are proud to assure you that Ravio maintains its long-standing compatibility with OSX 10.6!

Want to try out Ravio? Download the latest version from the Ravio software page.

Regards,
Aaron

Updates for PDF Bookmaker and Personal Group Emailer

November 20, 2015

  

Software having PDF documentation has been updated this week to allow better viewing and easier access to the documentation. Under the Help menu, three menu items now appear, to open the PDF in a window, in a PDF viewer, or online. Depending on the platform and where you bought the software, one of the options may not be available.

Windows versions cannot open the PDF in a window, and Mac App Store versions of the software cannot open the PDF in a PDF Viewer. Only the Mac versions of the software purchased directly from the H-Pi website have all three options enabled.

Click the images above or the links below to visit each software page, login and download the updates.

Regards,
Aaron

Track Snippets released for Mac OSX and Windows

November 17, 2015

Putting your audio tracks online can be a tricky business. Did you know that any audio streaming in a browser can be downloaded by anyone for free? This is true for all the independent audio outlets such as bandcamp, where entire albums are streamed, with no option for users to share only short preview excerpts instead of full tracks. This is also why online retailers like iTunes, Amazon, CD Baby, and others do not allow streaming entire content, and instead give visitors a chance to hear short previews of audio tracks before buying an album or audiobook.

Even if this issue doesn’t concern you, what if your tracks are long, and you would like to share shorter excerpts? What if you want to share one of your tracks as an iPhone ringtone? How are these kinds of short preview tracks prepared?

Normally, you get two choices: completely random automatic results from a 3rd party (which may also cost you something), or tedious manual work done yourself. Since you probably want to choose the content of your previews, you are likely to select the manual option. Each of your source tracks then has to be imported into digital audio editing software, clipped to length, fades added as needed, and exported in an appropriate audio format (usually mp3) – quite a tedious process.

In mid 2015, I released a few recordings I had been working on, and decided it was high time to make a tool for myself, to easily prepare preview excepts of my audio files in a way that would be less tedious and more fun than working in a DAW. Initially, I made a simple tool which had no user interface and worked entirely in code. Over the following months I developed this into a full-fledged application with a simple and intuitive user interface, adding many useful features along the way, always with an eye towards maintaining simplicity, testing all functions at every stage. The result is Track Snippets, for Mac OSX and Windows, which I'm pleased to introduce today through Mather Point Software.

Track Snippets is a tool made to do one thing: create previews (snippets) from your audio tracks, quickly and easily. You can make your snippets from source files in virtually any audio format. Track Snippets gives you exactly and only the tools you need to prepare your snippets. Editing can be done with the mouse, trackpad, and/or keyboard, with several ways to get quick results. Snippets can be exported in .wav, .mp3 (in a wide range of bit rates), .ogg (in the full range of quality levels), and even iPhone ringtone format, .m4r (a fun way to share your tracks, not usually available in audio editing software). The advantage of using this software is this: it saves a lot of time, and is a lot more fun to use for this purpose than a conventional DAW.

An example Track Snippets window is shown below with tracks from a spoken word project, an audio book version of Jill Jonnes Empires of Light. In this project, the snippets have been set to 30 second lengths, with 1-second fade-in and 4-second fade-out lengths. The screenshot was taken after tracks were imported, and the Move Snippets button was pressed to select random locations for the snippets. This is close to the 'automatic' option mentioned above. It is just one way to get some fast results without having to do any manual editing, to see how the software works. Clicking the Export Snippets button would save the results of this project as a folder of 192 kbps .mp3 files.

Of course, each snippet can be previewed, repositioned, resized, fade lengths changed, and so on, using the mouse, trackpad, or keyboard.

How will you use Track Snippets for your project? Want to try it out? Go ahead and download the release version of the software from the Track Snippets webpage.

Regards,
Aaron

PDF Bookmaker Update 1.4.1

August 15, 2015

Two weeks after release, PDF Bookmaker gets some attention to fix a few minor bugs and introduce some new features. It was suggested that there be a way to selectively hide the watermark on certain pages while showing it on others. I thought this was a splendid idea. It was also suggested that being able to scale the imported documents by some percentage would be useful. I agreed. So, you can now do those things. Here is the full list of version update details.

All registered users who have ideas about how to improve the software can submit feature requests. Requests are cataloged along with bug reports on the PDF Bookmaker reports page. Thanks for submitting bug reports and sharing your good ideas! You help make the software better.

Download the demo from the PDF Bookmaker software page.

Regards,
Aaron

Announcing PDF Bookmaker

August 03, 2015

So you are going to publish a book? I'm not surprised. You've got ideas, you want to share them, and the on-demand book printing industry and online selling model makes self publishing an attractive option. There are however some tricky bits to consider, aside from creating your masterpiece.

The default document format for this industry is the PDF, which we all know is cross-platform, and is easy to export from word processing, music composition, or graphic design software. What you may not have thought much about is that after you have finished the hard work of creating the content for your grand opus, the book must be properly organized and paginated before uploading to the printer. Creating separate documents for the different parts of your book as you are in the process of creating the content makes good sense; however, on-demand printers require a single PDF file to be submitted for your book, which poses an obvious problem when you’ve been working with separate documents. How do you combine the documents, and then number the pages properly? Do you really need to buy an expensive software to prepare your book? What if you want to add a watermark? The name of the game is self-publishing, so you have to figure all these things out. This is where PDF Bookmaker comes in.

There are plenty of applications that let you combine PDFs together. Most of them also offer basic editing features. Adobe's Acrobat is the best known app that does this, and it also costs hundreds of dollars. It's much more than most people need, but lightweight apps normally don't offer enough. The biggest problem is that these apps aren't designed to do only what you need to prepare your material for the on-demand printer, so they give you features you don't need, and trying to get them to do what you need is typically not fun. You've used a word processor or some other design software to make your content, and you'll use the same software to edit your source files, so what do you need PDF editing features for? You don't need them. What you need is a way to combine your source files, number the pages properly (which is not as straightforward as it might sound, unless you have a tool that already knows how to handle all the details), and possibly add a watermark. That's what PDF Bookmaker lets you do, fast, and with features that actually make tedious tasks fun. But why waste your time reading this, when you could be using the app to make your project a reality? The world waits for no one. Get to work! Download the demo from the PDF Bookmaker software page.

Regards,
Aaron

New MPS Website

May 09, 2015

Welcome to the new Mather Point Software website!

For several years, MPS apps have been available on the Mac App Store. The new website shopping cart lets you get those same apps directly from this website, with the added benefits of faster updates and easier interaction with support.

Ravio remains a Mac-only app, still compatible with Snow Leopard 10.6.6, and both Mac and Windows users can now get Personal Group Emailer for OS 10.7 and later, or Windows 7 and later.

Look for more cross-platform MPS apps to be released later in 2015.

Regards,
Aaron