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).
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.
