Macast
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Macast | |
 MacAmp 1.0b7 |
|
| Developer: | @soft |
|---|---|
| OS: | Mac OS |
| Use: | audio player |
| Website: | Macast circa 1999 |
Macast is a Mac OS audio player for MP3 and other formats. It was formerly named MacAMP, but changed its name in 1999.
The MacAMP player was first released on April 13, 1997 by Dmitry Boldyrev and Nullsoft. It quickly became the most popular MP3 player for the Mac OS, due to its relatively low CPU usage. Initial problems, such as the lack of a playlist, skipping the last 7 seconds of songs and problems with files larger than 4 megabytes were ironed out in the numerous alpha releases. The program itself never came out of beta and was eventually sold to @soft, who released a revised version called MacAMP Lite (MALT) in early 1999.
In September 1999, @soft renamed MacAMP and MacAMP Lite to Macast and Macast Lite to avoid confusion with Nullsoft's version for Windows called Winamp. Many users complained that the decoding engine had also been changed for the worse. This, along with the long beta cycles and slow updates, caused a significant decline in Macast's popularity and many users switched to other programs such as SoundJam MP and Audion.
MALT had the capability of plug-in localization files which were dubbed "phrasebooks". English was provided by default. The French, Italian and Greek localizations were made by Apostolos Koutropoulos. German, Japanese, Portuguese, Catalan, Danish, Dutch, FInnish, Hebrew, Hungarian, Icelandic, Russian, Indonesian, Korean, Norwegian, Ukrainian, Spanish and Swedish phrasebooks also were also available.
MacAst had a DJ version in the works that never made it to commercial status. You had the capability of playing two MP3 files, increase/decrease the volume of individual tracks, and cross-fade. There was however no "scratching" capability.
