Just a quick heads up: Path Finder 6.0.1 is now available, sporting two bug fixes--one for a crash and one to do with buying Path Finder. MU admins, feel free to delete this post once the update appears here. Thanks!

I won't assign a star rating to Bartender while it's still in beta, but I am, so far, very happy with it. I simply place my less-used menu bar items in the Bartender bar and keep the visible menu bar nice and clean. Also, apps whose menu bar icons I previously kept hidden to save space now sit unobtrusively in the Bartender bar, making these apps' menu items easily accessible without taking up needed space. Like a poster below, I had to log out and back in to get some apps to show up in the Bartender bar, but everything is working fine after doing so. A note about the beta pricing: you can use Bartender for free while it's in beta, and you can purchase a licence during the beta for half of what the retail price will be upon Bartender's release. Anyway, I'd recommend this app without hesitation to anyone with an excessively busy menu bar.

Launchpad was easily my least favourite new Lion feature. I want to give this app a quick spin though. Being able to set favourites could actually make Launchpad useful. +1 vote on changing the name, though.

I've been using Decibel for a couple months, and I'm very pleased with it. The sound is great, and I like the minimal interface. I do hope that some form of global control comes in a future version (i.e., global hotkeys, menubar item). Native FLAC support is also essential for me in an audio player.

Regarding comments from a certain individual about player sound quality, I'd like to clear a couple of things up. Strictly speaking, iTunes can be bit-perfect (i.e., it will accurately process the digital information in a sound file) with some features disabled and its digital volume slider at 100%. Where quality degradation usually occurs is along the path between the player and the speakers; Decibel's features are designed to minimize such degradation by minimizing the amount of processing, alteration, and interference to the digital signal. For example, iTunes enables by default the Sound Enhancer feature and (I think) the equalizer. Other possible stops beyond the player include CoreAudio-handled sample rate conversion and audio stream mixing (for handling simultaneous audio from multiple applications). Decibel omits features such Sound Enhancer, can automatically adjust the output device's sample rate to match the track playing, and can "hog" the output device so no other apps can send it audio (bypassing the mixer). There's also integer mode with some caveats (see link below) Memory play can also improve quality and avoid skipping by avoiding interference that can occur when disk access is occurring. The point is that avoiding unnecessary alteration, interference, and processing helps maintain the integrity of the digital signal, and thus the quality of the sound. For a more thorough and technical explanation of how audiophile players work, see this paper by the developer of Audirvana (which uses similar principles to Decibel: http://www.amr-audio.co.uk/large_image/MAC%20OSX%20audio%20players%20&%20Integer%20Mode.pdf
).

I'm not aware of anything better or even comparable to XLD for working with lossless audio on OS X (it can do plenty with lossy compression formats as well). XLD is great for doing so-called "perfect FLAC" rips, and can handle my additional transcoding needs as well (primarily converting FLAC to ALAC and, occasionally, to AAC). XLD strikes a good balance between providing a full set of advanced options and being straightforward enough for inexperienced users. Many thanks to the dev for all of his work on this excellent open-source app.

Quick tip for people trying VLC 2.0 RC 1. I experienced some very bad glitches initially. Deleting VLC's preferences cleared these up. Perhaps VLC 2 doesn't like something written to the preferences by VLC 1.x in some cases. There's a script included on the VLC disk image to delete prefs. To do it manually, you'll find the preference file at ~/Library/Preferences/org.videolan.vlc.plist.

The 64-bit version of this pre-release version of VLC 1.1.0 has the same problem I've experienced with every other 64-bit version of VLC: it almost invariably crashes on quitting. I guess it's best to stick to the 32-bit builds at least until the Lunettes project releases something.

I quite like MPlayer OS X Extended, and I use it as my default video player. For some reason, though, I've never been able to get its DVD playing feature to work properly. After opening a VIDEO_TS folder, MPlayer invariably hangs or just doesn't do anything. I'm wondering if it's because it's not capable of reading encrypted DVDs, but I can't find any documentation on this either way. If this is the case, it might be nice to be able to direct MPlayer to an existing copy of libdvdcss so it could decode encrypted VIDEO_TS. I would appreciate any feedback on this matter.

This latest beta is having a curious side effect for me. When MondoMouse is active, TextEdit repeatedly opens, over and over again. I can quit it or force quit it or whatever, and it will relaunch again within a few seconds. Deactivating MondoMouse causes the problem to cease. Snow Leopard 10.6.1, Intel Core 2 Duo.

I've been having quite a bit of trouble with ReduxEncoder. At first I was experiencing the error noted below on Leopard ("illegal comparison or logical"). Now on Snow Leopard (10.6.1), the old problem is gone away, but new issues have popped up. First I tried converting an XviD AVI file to DVD. The conversion to the MPG file went fine, but it would not proceed past that point to authoring the DVD structure. Whether I selected burnable image, VIDEO_TS folder, or burned DVD, after the conversion was done, "Authoring DVD" (or something like that) would pop up for a about a second above the progress bar, then it would claim the process was finished, leaving only the MPG file. Next I tried converting an H.264 MP4 file. With MEncoder decoding, it ran for about 5 minutes, then claimed it was finished. The result was a 400 MB partial MPG file. Trying the same conversion with VLC decoding never got past the "Starting conversion" phase. I know that ReduxEncoder is a work in progress, but I do hope that it reaches a fairly stable and usable state in the near future. It looks promising in many respects and is free, so I'm optimistic that it will turn out to be a worthy successor to the venerable VisualHub.