Rogue Amoeba Software, LLC is a Macintosh software company that produces audio software, specializing in applications for audio capture. Rogue Amoeba's best-known products are Audio Hijack and Audio Hijack Pro. The Audio Hijack programs allow for users to capture and record audio from any program running under Mac OS X

Mac OS X

Mac OS X is a series of Unix-based operating systems and graphical user interfaces developed, marketed, and sold by Apple Inc. Since 2002, has been included with all new Macintosh computer systems...

. The Pro version adds support for VST

Virtual Studio Technology

Steinberg's Virtual Studio Technology is an interface for integrating software audio synthesizer and effect plugins with audio editors and hard-disk recording systems. VST and similar technologies use digital signal processing to simulate traditional recording studio hardware with software...

, Audio Unit

Audio Units

Audio Units are a system-level plug-in architecture provided by Core Audio in Mac OS X developed by Apple Computer. Audio Units are a set of application programming interface services provided by the operating system to generate, process, receive, or otherwise manipulate streams of audio in...

, and LADSPA

LADSPA

LADSPA is an acronym for Linux Audio Developers Simple Plugin API. It is a standard for handling filters and effects, licensed under the GNU LGPL. It was originally designed for Linux through consensus on the Linux Audio Developers Mailing List, but works on a variety of other platforms...

 plugins, among other features.

Other software by Rogue Amoeba includes Nicecast, Airfoil, and Fission. Nicecast combines Audio Hijack's ability to capture audio with the open source Icecast

Icecast

Icecast is a streaming media project released as free software maintained by the Xiph.org Foundation. It also refers specifically to the server program which is part of the project. Icecast was created in December 1998/January 1999 by Jack Moffitt and Barath Raghavan to provide an open source...

 streaming media

Streaming media

Streaming media is multimedia that is constantly received by and presented to an end-user while being delivered by a streaming provider.The term "presented" is used in this article in a general sense that includes audio or video playback. The name refers to the delivery method of the medium rather...

 system to enable users to broadcast audio from any program over the internet. Airfoil allows for the transmission of any audio through the remote speaker system of Apple's AirPort Express

AirPort

AirPort and AirPort Extreme are local area wireless networking products from Apple Inc. based on the IEEE 802.11 standard ....

, which currently only supports audio from iTunes

ITunes

iTunes is a media player computer program, used for playing, downloading, and organizing digital music and video files on desktop computers. It can also manage contents on iPod, iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad....

. Fission is an audio file editor designed to be simple and user-friendly. It has basic operations like fading and splitting, and can edit MP3 files without losing quality to recompression.

Their programs have won numerous awards, including "Best of Show" at the 2004 San Francisco Macworld Conference & Expo

Macworld Conference & Expo

Produced by Boston-based IDG World Expo, Macworld | iWorld is a trade-show with conference tracks dedicated to the Apple Macintosh platform. It is held annually in the United States, usually during the second week of January...

, two O'Reilly

O'Reilly Media

O'Reilly Media is an American media company established by Tim O'Reilly that publishes books and Web sites and produces conferences on computer technology topics...

 Mac OS X Innovators Awards, and two Macworld

Macworld

Macworld is a web site and monthly computer magazine dedicated to Apple Macintosh products. It is published by Mac Publishing, which is headquartered in San Francisco, California...

 "Eddy" awards.

History

The beginnings of Rogue Amoeba came in 1998 when Alex Lagutin and Paul Kafasis began working together; first on the release of a small shareware add-on to the MacAMP MP3 player, and then at @soft Software, developers of MacAMP itself.

Along with Dmitry Boldyrev, creator of MacAMP, Lagutin and Kafasis left @soft to form Subband Software. They were later joined by Quentin Carnicelli, author of his own MP3 player. Subband went on to reacquire the MacAMP name, and released an MP3 player, again named MacAMP. While at Subband, Lagutin came up with the idea for a MacAMP plugin that would capture audio from other applications. Audio Hijack was born as a plugin for MacAMP for Mac OS 9

Mac OS 9

Mac OS 9 is the final major release of Apple's Mac OS before the launch of Mac OS X. Introduced on October 23, 1999, Apple positioned it as "The Best Internet Operating System Ever," highlighting Sherlock 2's Internet search capabilities, integration with Apple's free online services known as...

.

Early in 2002, the idea to make standalone application version of the Audio Hijack plugin began taking shape. Coding began later that year, with Lagutin reimplementing the hijacking code for Mac OS X, and Carnicelli building the application around it. Audio Hijack went on sale as a standalone Mac OS X application on September 30, 2002. Rogue Amoeba Software, LLC was officially registered December 31, 2002 by Lagutin, Carnicelli, and Kafasis.

External links

• Rogue Amoeba
• Paul Kafasis of Rogue Amoeba on Fission, their new audio editing tool, MacVoices, 2006-09-20