Hear from JoeSoft will change the way you listen to your computer and work with its sound. Whether you watch DVDs or YouTube clips, Hear gives you unprecedented control over the quality of the audio experience. Hear enhances your computer’s sound and gives you the ability to change audio settings to your heart's content.

An Audio Tinker-toy

This innovative and easy to use software delivers its sound altering tools in a one-window interface. Hear requires you restart your computer to install, so that it can add system files to your computer. It installs the Hear Daemon into a Hear folder inside the Application support folder, a Hear.plugin file into the Audio folder; both in the main Library folder. It also installs a plist file into your Home library Preferences folder. You cannot remove Hear by tossing it in the Trash; you must use the Uninstall command inside the application.

The main Hear program contains 13 panes in which you customize your listening experience in hundreds of ways. A Manual pop-up menu provides a seemingly endless variety of preset choices, if you don't want to customize the sound yourself. With one click, you choose the Hear preset to process your audio through software mixing and equalizing. It includes different settings for speakers and headphones and it is easy to save the settings if you wish to tweak presets to dial up your audio enjoyment to perfection. Most of the tabbed panes include an Enable button to turn on the features. After you make your changes, Hear processes the audio transparently, even when the application is not running. You have to launch Hear and turn it off to go back to your original sound.


Hear Main Window
In comparison to the equalizer in iTunes, Hear is more user friendly and accessible, plus provides simple control for all applications, whereas iTunes equalizes only one application. Hear enables you to simulate different speakers, rooms, or even make a studio recording session sound more like a live performance.

Features in Short

If you have a discerning ear and are not an MP3 fan, prepare to lose a few nights while you customize music genres in iTunes, audio files stored on your computer, or what you listen to on the Internet. Hear is an audiophile's fantasy come to fruition. The feature set is downright amazing and the only frustration may be that you can’t apply the changes to individual files.

First, there are six categories of presets covering Defaults, Effects, Games, Movies and TV, Music, and Speech ¬– all with subcategories.


Hear Main Window - Defaults Open
Second, the General tab includes sliders and adjustments for Super Bass, DeWoofer, Ambience and Fidelity, a volume button, plus the ability to enable any one of the 10 panes. Handy On and Mute buttons appear on every pane. An FX Chain popup menu lets you choose the order in which sound enhancements are applied.

Third, you can choose which applications you want your changes to affect and even apply different settings to different applications.


Mixer Pane
For example, in the Mixer window, you choose which application audio Hear processes through its mixer by simply clicking a checkbox in a list of running applications. You want to deselect the Finder, because its audio is optimized for the flat equalization the Mac OS X provides.

Fourth, you can adjust every nuance of the sound you experience through your Macintosh with speakers or headphones by combining settings on the options within each tab.


Speaker Pane
In the interest of space, I’ll just list the pane options. They include an Equalizer (EQ), Mixer, 3D, Ambience (reverb effect), FX, Maximizer, Brainwave Synthesizer (BW), Limiter, Space, Fidelity, Speaker, and Subwoofer (Sub). You can even view the Equalizer with a curve or slider controls. You can save any of your customized settings as a preset also.