Max (Macintosh Audio for OS X) is a Mac OS X application for ripping and encoding MP3 audio files.

When extracting audio from compact discs, Max offers the maximum in flexibility to ensure the true sound of your CD is faithfully extracted. For pristine discs, Max offers a high-speed ripper with no error correction. For damaged discs, Max can either use its built-in comparison ripper (for drives that cache audio) or the error-correcting power of cdparanoia.

Once the audio is extracted, Max can generate audio in over 20 compressed and uncompressed formats including MP3, Ogg (Vorbis), FLAC, AAC, Apple Lossless, Monkey's Audio, WavPack, Speex, AIFF and WAVE.

If you would like to convert your audio from one format to another, Max can read and write audio files in over 20 compressed and uncompressed formats at almost all sample rates and in most sample sizes. For many popular formats the artist and album metadata is transferred seamlessly between the old and new files. Max can even split a single audio file into multiple tracks using a cue sheet.

Max leverages open source components and the resources of Mac OS X to provide extremely high-quality output. For example, MP3 encoding is accomplished with LAME, Ogg (Vorbis) encoding with aoTuV, FLAC encoding with libFLAC, and AAC and Apple Lossless encoding with Core Audio. Many PCM conversions are also possible using Core Audio and libsndfile.

Max is integrated with MusicBrainz to permit automatic retrieval of compact disc information. For MP3, FLAC, Ogg (FLAC), Ogg (Vorbis), Monkey's Audio, WavPack, AAC and Apple Lossless files Max will write this metadata to the output.

Max allows full control over where output files are placed and what they are named. If desired, Max will even add the encoded files to your iTunes library in a playlist of your choice.

For advanced users, Max allows control over how many threads are used for encoding, what type of error correction is used for audio extraction, and what parameters are used for each of the various encoders.

Here are some key features of "Max":

· High-quality MP3 encoding using the LAME encoding engine, with full support for user configuration.
· Integrated with FreeDB to automatically acquire artist and track names using libcddb.
· Output tagged with ID3v2.4 tags using TagLib.
· Growl support for notification of ripping and encoding status.
· Automatic detection of multi-artist albums.
· Multithreaded encoding, with user-configurable number of threads.
· User-configurable output file naming.
· Best of all, Max is free software distributed under the terms of the GPL.

What's New in This Release: [ read full changelog ]

· Formats preference pane works correctly on Snow Leopard.