Hear

People who expect to flip the switch on this software and get incredible sound out of any audio set-up, expect magic. Hear is loaded with all kinds of presets which are basically worthless. To get good sound out of a particular system, one needs to tweak the necessary settings to the correct parameters. Now, this is the main problem with Hear: you need to be kind of an audio engineer to do this. You may be lucky with one of the presets, but most of those use way too exaggerated settings just to showcase what Hear can do. The better the audio system, the closer each setting should be to 'zero' or 'neutral'. I know which settings to tweak in order to make a $5 headset sound like a Sennheiser, or get less crummy sound out of the tinny speakers in my MacBook Pro. But the 'average Joe' has no clue which of the 100+ settings to tweak in order to counteract the 10+ mysterious shortcomings of his/her particular system. Maybe some kind of comprehensive guide should be supplied which explains how each particular setting can be used to counteract a particular shortcoming of a sound system, and which settings are just pure 'ear-candy'. Since I have learnt how to use it, Hear has become almost essential for me. Unfortunately my major gripe with this program is that it's riddled with bugs. First of all, Hear has a memory leak. It will increase the memory usage of each and every application that plays sounds, each time a new sound is loaded or played. Eventually this will make the program crash, after slowing down your Mac to a crawl due to swapping. For instance, Audacity 1.3.6 will quickly consume all of the 3GB of RAM on my machine when loading a large sound and pressing the 'play' button a few times. Next, the controls will stop working at random moments, including the 'on/off' button. In such cases, the only way to regain control of Hear is either logging out, or manually killing the Hear Daemon and closing and re-opening all sound-related programs. Finally, when changing presets or settings, the previous settings are still used when a new QuickTime movie is loaded afterwards. The Hear interface must be quit and re-opened to 'fixate' the new settings. The 'average Joe' will not realise that any of the 3 above behaviours are bugs, except maybe the first one. The second and third bug will only make it seem like Hear doesn't work at all. If anyone at JoeSoft reads this, I highly recommend fixing those bugs as soon as possible. I really love this program but it will only be a matter of time before my frustration due to those bugs piles up so high that I start to hate it.

Nice app. But it does not support iTunes on Mac (Version 12.6.1 and above). Unfortunately, at this time support team have not heard any news from our developers about an update for Hear.

After 1.3 update Hear hangs on startup (OS X 10.9.5). Any solutions?

I use HEAR since years – e.g. on my Mac Mini as a media center audio supporting software and I'm still excited what one can adjust with it. I use it for example to enhance streaming audio – the results are awesome. The developer keeps on updating it and so I even would pay for it twice.