Best Songwriting Software For Mac

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Best Songwriting App For Mac
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Best Songwriting Software For Mac
Best Songwriting Software For Mac

For Mac users, iTunes is the undisputed king of media managment and playback. Every new computer comes with it pre-installed, and if you have an iPod, iPhone, or iPad, then you’ll need it for syncing media and backing up your device locally.

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There are valid reasons to dislike iTunes though. The rise of Spotify and other similar services have made iTunes less useful or event obsoleteSpotify Your Music Collection: The End Of iTunesSpotify Your Music Collection: The End Of iTunesSpotify is no longer content to just compete with radio, now they're competing with the idea of even owning music.Read More. Another big issue is the lack of ownership in digital mediaThe End of Ownership: Netflix, Spotify, and The Streaming GenerationThe End of Ownership: Netflix, Spotify, and The Streaming GenerationStreaming media is convenient, but you're giving up something important: ownership of digital media.Read More. But perhaps most pressing of all is the fact that iTunes is bloated and slow.

Yes, you can hack iTunes for better usability8 iTunes Hacks For Improved Functionality8 iTunes Hacks For Improved FunctionalityiTunes is a rich and feature-packed music management application, but that doesn't mean there's not room for improvement. Some simple changes and additional features can make the application even better.Read More but it’s not enough for everyone. Unless you’re absolutely tied to the iTunes ecosystem and have no choice but to use it, you may want to consider switching to one of these alternatives.

Tomahawk

If you want a modern cross-platform music player that’s feature-complete and smooth as cream, then Tomahawk may be the one for you. We mentioned it as one of the best music players for Linux4 Linux Music Players That Deserve Your Attention Now4 Linux Music Players That Deserve Your Attention NowWhich Linux music player is the best? We compare four excellent music players you may not know about.Read More and that’s certainly true for OS X as well.

The real draw of Tomahawk is that it aims to be an all-in-one solution for all of the various music services available on the web. Why juggle half a dozen different apps and sites when you can consolidate all of them into TomahawkUse Too Many Music Services? Consolidate Your Music With Open-Source Social Player Tomahawk [Cross-Platform]Use Too Many Music Services? Consolidate Your Music With Open-Source Social Player Tomahawk [Cross-Platform]Some users may wonder whether they should stick with music streaming services and ditch downloading songs to their local drives, or simply rely on the streaming options, because let’s face it, music streaming services are..Read More? It’s just easier that way.

Free Songwriting Software For Pc

Tomahawk supports plugins that let you “plug into” different media networks, including Spotify, YouTube, Google Play Music, Deezer, and even Amazon Music (which is actually better than we expected it to beWhy You Should Give Amazon Prime Music a Second ChanceWhy You Should Give Amazon Prime Music a Second ChanceThere are several reasons why you might want to give Amazon Prime Music a second chance. It certainly deserves much more credit than it's currently getting. Read on to find out why.Read More). Spotify support, for example, lets you sync playlists into Tomahawk.

If you’re going to use Tomahawk, we recommend going with the nightly release because it’s the most up-to-date and has the most cutting-edge features. The downside is that it may be prone to bugs and crashes. If you only need basic functionality, the stable release may be better.

Vox Player [No Longer Available]

A lot of Windows-to-Mac converts tend to ask about any good music players that are similar to Foobar2000. Unfortunately, at this time, no such alternative really exists. Vox Player is probably the closest we’ve got, but more so for its minimalist design than its resource usage.

Indeed, Vox Player can be quite greedy at times with CPU and RAM, sometimes even on par with iTunes! But it’s a nice alternative to tryStop iTunes From Taking Your Media Keys Hostage: Use Vox InsteadStop iTunes From Taking Your Media Keys Hostage: Use Vox InsteadStop iTunes from launching, and use your media keys with a program you don’t hate. Here’s how.Read More because it doesn’t have much feature bloat.

Vox Player comes with all you’d expect in a music player and it’s fast. Not only does it support FLAC playback, but it can also play high-resolution audio files if you’re into that. Music management is clean and straightforward, it has built-in internet radio, and you can also connect it to SoundCloud and Last.FM. There’s a lot to love about it.

One other feature to note: Vox comes with a 14-day trial of Loop, a cloud music storage service. With it, you can easily keep Vox for Mac in sync with Vox for iOS, and music you’ve stored in the cloud can be downloaded to either device for offline playback. Loop usage is optional.

For apps similar to Vox for high-resolution files, take a look at this list of the best hi-res music players for MacThe 5 Best Hi-Res Music Player Apps for MacThe 5 Best Hi-Res Music Player Apps for MacIf you're an audiophile who prefers high-resolution audio, iTunes simply won't cut it. So here are the best hi-res music player apps for Mac.Read More.

Clementine

If you’re looking for a feature-packed but lightweight music player, then you really can’t go wrong with Clementine. This nifty application is all of the power that you need without any of the excess. It gets updated about once a year, which is nice as well.

Music management is probably Clementine’s top selling point. It comes with a cover manager, queue manager, playlist management tools, music format transcoder (with FLAC support), CD ripping tool, and an advanced tag editor for batch editing music files.

Out of the box, Clementine can integrate with about a dozen different internet services, including cloud storage services (Amazon Cloud Drive, Dropbox, Google Drive, to name a few) and music streaming services (Spotify, SoundCloud, Last.FM, Subsonic, plus more).

It’s not the prettiest application, and it’s plainly obvious that it’s based on Qt4, something you’ll recognize if you’ve used Qt4 applications before. You can tweak the appearance a bit, but nothing major so you’re stuck with the clunky default interface. It’s not that bad, but it does leave a lot to be desired.

Nightingale

Do you remember Songbird? It was an open source music player released back in 2006 that drummed up a lot of hype and anticipation due to its potential. It was shut down in 2013, but by then users had already forked the code and created an alternative called Nightingale.

So if you were a fan of Songbird and want something similar, or if you want a lightweight open source music player that still gets updated, then you really ought to give this one a try. It will likely be everything you expect it to be.

Key features include a skinnable interface, advanced library management, gapless playback, replay gain, built-in web browser, and extensions that can add even more features like integration with certain web services. It can also play DRM audio locked by Apple FairPlay and Windows Media.

The one big downside to Nightingale is that development has slowed down since 2014. Yes, it will still work just fine and the important functions are all there, but if you run into any bugs or if you’re looking forward to some other features, fixes will be a long time coming.

Quod Libet

Quod Libet has a funny name — it means “whatever you wish” in Latin — but don’t let that turn you away. This open source music player, which was designd to be cross platform from the get-go, was released back in 2004 and continues to receive regular updates to this day.

Best Songwriting App For Mac

Not many people have ever heard of it, which is a shame. It’s a simple piece of software and nothing about it will blow your mind, but it’s intensely practical and easy to use. The simplicity of it makes it the closest antithesis to iTunes currently available on OS X.

And it’s packed with features: supports for all kinds of media formats (including FLAC), smart replay gain, ratings-weighted random playback, Unicode tags, built-in Internet radio, configurable user interface, advanced library management, and so much more.

Which Music Player Do You Use?

I know there are lots of valid reasons to keep using iTunes. I don’t want to say it’s terrible and everyone should switch away, because it isn’t. I still use it to manage my podcasts, so I do realize that iTunes has a role to play even despite the bloat and what not. And if you’re using Apple Music, you have no chance but to use iTunes for playback on your Mac.

But if you deal with a lot of downloaded MP3s and streamed songsThe Pros And Cons Of Streaming vs Downloading MP3sThe Pros And Cons Of Streaming vs Downloading MP3sI've been a long-time user of streaming music services – from Pandora, to the now defunct online music locker Lala.com, and now as a monthly subscriber to Rdio.com. If you have a computer and a..Read More from lots of different locations, maybe one of these alternatives might actually play out better for you. It’s much more convenient than bookmarking several different internet radio sitesWhich Internet Radio Sites Have the Best User Experience in the Browser?Which Internet Radio Sites Have the Best User Experience in the Browser?Exploring the web players for various Internet radio services to see which ones offer the best experience in the browser. What good is a great radio selection if the player is frustrating to use?Read More, for example.

Which music player do you use on OS X and why? What’s wrong with iTunes? We’d love to hear from you in the comments down below!

Explore more about: iTunes, Media Player, OS X El Capitan, Streaming Music.

Vox music player has good sound, but I'm cancelling my Premier membership because: (1) I don't know how to use it (2) There is no manual or even the skimpiest set of operating instructions (3) Their 'technical help' is a joke. I can't recall ever having received less useful 'help.'
I appreciate the list but I have no idea how the author can defend anything about iTunes. It is the most poorly designed, unintuitive, and user-unfriendly program I have ever used. I'm looking forward to trying Clementine and/or Quod Libet and eradicating iTunes from my life.
So far, Quodlibet is working fine for me. I have my music on two different external hard drives, and all I want is a player that will play those files and do nothing else. Cog was great when it was working, but the version I had developed some glitches recently, and when I replaced it with a newer version, I no longer had a player that would list the tracks. Everything else I've tried has either not had gapless playback even though they claim to (Pine player and Musique), or skips to the middles of tracks or even skips over tracks (Songbird) or seems set up more to organize your already organized collection before playing anything than just simply playing whichever track or tracks you tell it to play, you know, like a player!! (Nightingale).
iTunes I dabbled in briefly when I first bought my Mac, and backed out of quickly when it was clear that it simply wanted to take over my computer and then the world. (Hypberbole.) Other alternatives I've not even bothered to try--the ones who loudly proclaim all the fancy ass organizing and synching capacities they have. That's great if you're into that kind of thing, I guess. I just want to play the 26 individual tracks of Rachmaninoff's 'Paganini Variations,' without any hiccoughs,* delete those tracks from the player when I'm done, and then play the six tracks of Zimmermann's 'Requiem.' And so forth. Period.
Cog did that exceptionally well. I will still keep an eye on them, I suppose. For the moment, though, Quodlibet plays whatever I tell it to play, let's me delete those tracks when I'm done, and accepts the next track or tracks to play without any whinging. At the moment, I'm content.
*In my recording, each variation gets its own track, ranging from :18 to 1:26 in length. That's a lot of hiccoughs to sit through in less than half an hour.
I am looking for an alternative to iTunes as I am fed up with running out of space on my devices. I thought that iCloud would provide the solution but you can't use it for music unless you subscribe to Apple Music and that won't play anything you haven't purchased through iTunes so all the music that has come from other sources needs to have a different player. I have been adding music to my library since the late 1990s so there is a lot! You also have the problem that my original Apple ID was not an email address as it didn't need to be but when they insisted that you had to have an email address as your Apple ID I was not able to simply change the original Apple ID to an email address I had to have a new one. I have also subsequently had to change my email address due to it being hacked and so have yet another Apple ID as I again could not change my existing Apple ID. Apple was such an elegantly simple system at the beginning and now they seem to be making it more and more obtuse and costly.
With constant iTunes upgrades over the past few years the access to my music was encumbered. Old iTunes accounts through other email addresses were dumped. Support was taken away for not going on iCloud. Also, I tubed the use of an iPhone and they locked me out of my iTunes account.
How's that?
Hello Community!
I found this article over a year ago after it was posted. Thanks for this.
I am a professional dancer and have more than 200gb of Arabic orchestral and dance music (which most is not on iTunes Store) and I cannot have it on my iPhone, also have about 100Gb of classical music organized according to my own organization criteria (iTunes also have classical music messed up).
I haven't find yet an ecosystem (doesn't matter if its payed) that allows me to be off the cloud, on my Mac and my iPhone, with the music organized the wat I want it.
Any suggestions?
Thanks in advance!
- Google Play Music - free version. Upload your stuff there
Hi,
I'm surprised that no one mentioned cog which is much lighter than above.
(BTW deadbeef for mac is available at https://f.losno.co/deadbeef_osx.zip )
VOX the BEST for me! iTunes does not support high-resolution music files. https://vox.rocks/mac-music-player
- HI Bi!
  I loooove Vox. Using it on my iPhone and Mac! And if you also use WALTR to transfer files – then you don't even need to launch iTunes.
- I tried VOX, it completely sucks!
  You have to either sign up, or pay for services just to get your library into it. Its a completely backwards move forcing users to submit to their ways.
  Its a shame as the software looked so promising, but it looks like they have just recently done this after getting lots of users onboard and used to their product, then they push out an update and make them pay.. Its a really shitty move..
  - That's unfortunate.. you should try Voltra! You have to create an account but it's free + full featured and they're not annoying with the premium offering. I have been using it for months now and I really like it.
- Does it have playlist managment?
I have a lot of CDs, first cuts from jazz recordings that, in several cases, are pretty rare. ITunes wants for force me into buying, frankly, from their usually inferior selections. I do not care about social media, I do not care what some teenybopper thinks is popular, I think ratings are stupid and adolescent. I know wht I like and that's what I want to hear. I just want to play back those recordings without iTunes wanting to 'fix,' 'rearrange,' or otherwise do my musical thinking for me. I HATE iTunes!
Already last year after an Itunes update the whole library was gone. After reassembling most of it it became scrambled and mixed up. Today it wouldn't random correctly and many songs on albums are missing and albums split into many same albums with a part of the songs. I have no idea how that happened as I not update anymore.
Itunes just sucks and I am afraid there is no alternative. Tried TOMAHAWK today : not worth the download. VOX is just not right, no correct display and quite basic. Not know what to do.
- try clementime
Great to find alternatives to iTunes, however a sad state of affairs that few tell you before downloading that old 'problem' that it's not compatible with anything before V10.9.
SO ! not much use wasting time downloading only to find 'not compatible with your current operating system' iMac is now beginning to suffer the same constraints of continual updates as MS-Windoze. I will soon be driven back to my LINUX as per my 7 year old laptop with UBUNTU.
SO MUCH FOR COMPATIBILITY.
- Amen! I am having ro re-upload from CDs because of all those dimwitted upgrades!!!
  - why? the mp3 should still be on your computer? you should just point to the file where it is. in mac use finder search or in console 'find / -iname mp3'
I cam to your article because I was using iTunes and it kept trying to connect to the iTunes store, but my computer is not online so it couldn't do it. So then it left me with a message that it couldn't connect to iTunes store and then stopped working. It simply sat there and wouldn't respond to any buttons at all. so I quit the program permanently and came to look for an alternative.
it would seem that the main function of iTunes is just to lock you into using the iTunes store and making big bucks for Apple.
It was never a great program, now it is just unusable. there has to be something better out there.
iTunes can't find album art works.
What is different way to get it ?
What players support ALAC? Can I simply drag=drop my files to the new player and GO?
Latest iTunes is AWFUL and I can no longer even see bitrate of files and keep them apart. My 2 playlists have simply lost a couple albums. I have NO idea where they went. But I see them If I dig deep enough into that cumbersome interface.
Shame on APPLE.
Over the past couple of days 10.20.16 to last night I have imported 91. As of a few minutes ago songs 14 thru 91 are gone. What's happening? I also keep podcasts and movies in iTunes. Are the any alternatives that will handle everything?
Thanks
If iTunes does not meet your needs, here UFUShare show you the best alternatives to iTunes. Apple's software is often criticized because of its difficulty of use, lack of some interesting functions, or the time it takes to perform the actions that are requested. It is by this that in this article UFUShare bring you the top 3 best alternatives to iTunes , so you can choose the best program according to the needs and how you use it.
I've just about given up on iTunes. I'm on a 12-hour Zurich-to-Los Angeles flight, and I can't play any of my music on my iPad now, and very little on my iPhone. The problem with the iPad (probably) is that I haven't started up iTunes since being FORCED by Apple to move up to the current IOS. (Or lose all my passwords in the chain.) Then I didn't start iTunes while connected to the Internet so that Apple could 'authenticate' my ownership of the music. Mind you, this for about 1600 songs ripped from my own CDs, and 400 or so purchased from Apple. Who knows what the problem is on the iPhone. I did think to play a few bars of one of my songs while connected. But now my playlists seem to ONLY have the purchased songs available. The songs ripped from my CDs are not there! Enough!!!
Hi Denis! First of all, thanks a lot, for the time, dedication and for sharing all this info with the world.
Dennis I'm a music lover and for me to keep my music perfectly organized is a question of need and passion. I have a big amount of files (36.162 items and growing) stored in an external 500 Gb HD. I'm using the last versions of the Mac OS system and iTunes; El Capitan 10.11.6 and iTunes 12.4.3.1.
My problem is iTunes is giving me constant errors when importimg new albums to my library. An example of this is: albums separated in two, without any apparent reason. I am very careful when I edit the data of each album in the info window. I like to have all the information for each one of them, and the error factor when I do this is basically zero. I try to fix this by selecting all the tracks and editing the information of all of them together but it keep showing the albums separated; even when if you go to the HD and check out the location of the files in the iTunes media folder they are all in one folder organized by artist as you could expected. Another example is: tracks duplicated and separated from its original album. One more time, only in the iTunes window, not in the iTunes media folder where they are perfectly stored.
This is driving crazy man.. lol
I will appreciate deeply any help or advice that you could give me.
And one more time thanks a lots.
Greetings
Daniel.
- Album Artist field needs to be One name
- When you import tracks, drag them into a playlist and work from there instead of tracking stuff down in the main library. All the tracks will be in one place and easily editable.
- Daniel: yes, similar issues; and my collection is a bit large as well. iTunes arbitrarily separates tracks, ignores the tracks' names that I fill in--because my recordings are sometimes rare and not in their crappy database. I am going to continue to look, as iTunes, in my book is beyond juvenile and useless! Good Luck!
Dennis Thank you for your help. Yet as a novice how do I get into the metadata editor? Thanks in anticipation
Have all of my music on Google Drive. Tomahawk does not support Google Drive. Neither does Vox, Nightingale or Quod Libet. Clementine DOES, but cannot read WAV, AIFF or M4A files, which is all I have, and will require me to reconvert everything to FLAC. Which I could do, but CloudConvert on Google Chrome has a very limited free option and I have a lot of music.
Thoughts?
- i would love to know the answer to that question if you have found the solution yet please?
How about Sonora ? it's still working, u can get on github :)
There's no mention of the awfulness of the Vox app. Why is that? Requiring users to sign up for the Loop service in order to use Vox prevents even the least evaluation of that software. And then it makes it seem like you have to pay for Loop for 24 months at $9.99 to use it. What's sketchy about all this is that there's no documentation of these things on the Vox site. You learn about it only after download and running the program.
That Vox requires you to upload music is bad in so many ways. It's bandwidth hogging and by default would delete music on a Mac on upload. Vox could wipe out your local library if you do what it asks of you at installation.
- Perhaps they have changed the install since your comment, but I was able to install and use Vox without signing up for Loop. It's not super-obvious, but on the stage of the install process where it asks you to register for Loop, there is a 'Skip' button. I clicked this and got Vox installed and running without any interaction with Loop.
  So far Vox seems decent enough, though you should be aware that Vox does not have it's own music library, so if you don't use Loop, Vox will be working with your iTunes library.
I have an extensive music collection (over 150Gb, so far) and I've been using iTunes for a long time. I do not download any music from the iTunes store. My music is copied from my CD collection. The problem is that iTunes only seems to store my music on my computer. I have everything copied to an external hard drive and would rather use that for storage and playback, rather than sacrifice space on my computer's hard drive. Any solutions out there?
- The easy thing you can do is go into the iTunes preferences and then to the advanced tab. From there you can select where you want the iTunes library to be. This is the location where it'll store any info about your library and the album artwork. If you uncheck 'Copy files to iTunes Media folder when adding to library' it will just link to the files where they were original located before you added them, i.e. your external drive.
  If you like the way that iTunes organizes your files you can always switch the location of your library to your external and then when you add files it will just add them there. I hope this helps. If you just want to start fresh with a new library hold down option while you click on the dock icon to open the app and a dialogue will open allowing you to start a new library wherever you like.
  As someone with a nearly 2TB music collection I understand the need to run it off of an external source.
  - I'm attempting to arrange a similar setup. I'm using dBpoweramp Music Converter to rip my CD collection in uncompressed AIFF onto my 2T external HDD. When I try to playback the files using iTunes as my music manager, iTunes automatically copies the tracks, (converting to ACC, I assume?) into my music library, (currently located on my local HD).
    I don't want to duplicate my music library, either on my local HD or on my external HD, nor do I want iTunes to 'possess' my music and make it unavailable to me outside of iTunes. So, I'm looking for a music manager to play tracks directly from the AIFF files via Mac OS X.
    - No, it's just making exact copies. Go into your iTunes Preferences go to the Advanced tab and uncheck 'Copy files to iTunes Media folder when adding to library'
    - Thank you, Dennis! I made the change to preferences. Then attached my external drive, and selected an album to play via iTunes (via Add to Library). It started playing right away. All seems great!
      Stopped playback, ejected the external drive, closed and reopened iTunes. The album and song titles are still listed (that threw me) but the song files are not on my local drive! Viola. That was easy!
      Most grateful for your quick reply. Cheers.
What I hate most about itunes is its lack of filing. I may be dumb or simplistic but no one including Apple has been able to explain how to file my music by Artist - period. Whenever you have an album of duets, tribute to, or again a cd of Grammy Award Nominees they are all over your library. If there is a reason for that or a work around I'm all ears.
- Yeah theres an easy fix. Select all the songs on an album and then right click and select get info. Then in the metadata editor where it says album artist Type in the main artist. This will group all the tracks together under a single artist while still keeping the original artist intact. i.e. Artist feat Other Person.
  - Or click on the Compilation checkbox to have it filed as an Album instead of By Artist.
    - Only problem with doing it that way is that it places the files in a separate 'Compilations' folder, and in your library puts the album down at the bottom under the compilations section rather than just the main artist.
I use all Apple devices, but am so aggravated with iTunes messing up my music with its many flaws. Either my Last Date Played or Play Count gets messed up, or songs go missing or Apple released yet another iTunes update that messes everything up. I am looking at Tomahawk right now.
- Yeah theres an easy fix. Select all the songs on an album and then right click and select get info. Then in the metadata editor where it says album artist Type in the main artist. This will group all the tracks together under a single artist while still keeping the original artist intact. i.e. Artist feat Other Person.
  - Sorry hit the wrong reply button.
How does one get the amazon plugin? I don't see any info whatsoever on their website or in the app.
For me, personally, the best feature of Clementine is that it allows you to manage your library the way YOU want, based on its almos unique (at least for mac apps) folder-based option. I hate it when you have to follow the criteria programs impose on you.. I don't always want to see my music organized by album or artist or whatever, but prefer to organize it myself into folders. This also allows me to keep files that don't always come with all the meta info software would need to label it properly. It's a shame Clementine is so ugly, but hell does it give you back some degree of controll over your own files. This is a feature I always missed since I totally migrated to mac, and that was present in the normally so-maligned Windows Media Player in its newer iterations.
There is a saying, something like: if ain’t broken don’t try to fix it.
That, and having two computers, both Apple, an iMac and a MacBook Pro makes sense to keep iTunes and not to try something else.
- Trouble is it isn't working any more! I have had a Mac desktop for over 25 years, an iPhone since they first came out (iPod previously) and an iPad for 5 years. At the beginning they all worked really well together now with continual updates I seem to have less and less space on my devices even though I haven't added anything!
I am not ready to switch from iTunes to any other music player.
It has many more advantages than disadvantages especially for a Mac user.
I use Vox, but I will be taking a look at Clementine.

Edit Video on Your PC

Nothing makes an impression like moving pictures with sound. That's why digital video continues to grow in importance online. Couple that trend with the ever-increasing availability of devices capable of high-resolution video recording—phones, GoPros, DSLRs—and the case for ever-more powerful video editing software becomes clear. Further, the software must be usable by nonprofessionals, and it has to keep up with newer formats such as HEVC (High Efficiency Video Coding) and 360-degree VR video, and it has to be able to handle 4K and higher resolution.

Increasingly, new capabilities trickle down from professional-level software to the consumer category. That's a good thing for nonprofessional movie editors, since the more consumer-oriented software tends to make easier procedures that can sometimes be pretty tricky in the pro-level software. Read on for a survey of the latest trends in video editing software along with our top picks in the field.

Multicam, Motion Tracking, and Yet More Motion

Advanced abilities continue to make their way into accessible, affordable, and consumer-friendly video editing software as each new generation of software is released. For example, multicam editing, which lets you switch among camera angles of the same scene shot with multiple video cameras, used to be a feature relegated to pro-level software. Now this and many other advanced effects are available in programs designed for use by nonprofessional enthusiasts.

Another impressive effect that has made its way into consumer-level video editing software is motion tracking, which lets you attach an object or effect to something moving in your video. You might use it to put a blur over the face of someone you don't want to show up in your video. You specify the target face, and the app takes care of the rest, tracking the face and moving the effect to follow it. This used to be the sole province of special effects software such as Adobe After Effects. Corel VideoStudio was the first of the consumer products to include motion tracking, and it still leads the pack in the depth and usability of its motion-tracking tool, though several others now include the capability.

The 4K Video Factor

Support for 4K video source content has become pretty standard in video editing software, but the support varies among the products. For example, some but not all of the applications can import Sony XAVC and XAVC-S formats, which are used by Sony's popular DSLRs, mirrorless cameras, camcorders, and professional video cameras. The same holds true for the H.265 High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard. Most of the applications here now can import and export HEVC, though there are still a few holdouts.

360-Degree VR Support

Several of the products here (Adobe Premiere Elements is a notable exception) still support 3D video editing if that's your thing, though the this has been replaced by 360-degree VR footage like that shot by the Samsung Gear 360 as the current home-theater fad. As is often the case, our Editors' Choice, CyberLink PowerDirector was the first product in this group to offer support for this new kind of video media.

Other programs have jumped on board with 360 VR support, including Adobe Premiere, Apple Final Cut Pro X, and Magix Movie Edit Pro. Support varies, with some apps including 360-compatible titles, stabilization, and motion tracking. PowerDirector is notable for including those last two. Final Cut offers a useful tool that removes the camera and tripod from the image, often an issue with 360-degree footage.

Free Songwriting Software Downloads

Video Editing 101

Of course, none of the extras matter if an app can't do the most basic editing tasks. At this point, however, all of the products included here do a good job of letting you join, trim, and split video clips. They also let you make use of special effects such as animated transitions, picture-in-picture (PiP), chroma-key (the technique that lets you place a subject against any background, often known as green screening), and filters that enhance colors or apply creative effects and distortions. With most of them you can add a multitude of timeline tracks that can accommodate video clips, effects, audio, and text overlays.

A tool coming to the latest versions of video editing applications is support for seamless transitions. Picture a scene showing people at a beach, and suddenly the sky zooms in and your in Rome or Paris, but it looks like you're in the same place because the transition glued the two scenes together using the sky. There are plenty of other examples of seamless transition; this magnificent video shows a good selection of them, and is partly responsible for starting the trend.

Color, LUTs and CLUTs

One of the capabilities that has been making its way into consumer-level video editing software is more-detailed color grading. Color wheels, curves, and histograms give editors control over the intensity of every shade. Related to this is support for LUTs (lookup tables), also known as CLUTs (color lookup tables). This staple of pro-level software lets you quickly change the look of a video to give it a specific mood. For example, think of the dark blue look of thriller movies like The Revenant. You can download LUTs for free from several sites or use those included with some video software to give your video a specific look. One well-known LUT type is the kind that can make a daytime scene look like it was shot at night.

Where the Action Is

Many video editing apps now include tools that cater to users of action cameras such as the GoPro Hero7 Black. For example, several offer automated freeze-frame along with speedup, slowdown, and reverse time effects. CyberLink PowerDirector's Action Camera Center pulls together freeze frame with stabilization, slo-mo, and fish-eye correction, and color correction for underwater footage. Magix Movie Edit Pro Premium includes the third-party NewBlue ActionCam Package of effects. And Wondershare Filmora lets you subscribe to new effect packs on an ongoing basis.

Titles That Zing

I've been seeing a lot of attention paid to creating title effects in the applications over the past year. Apple Final Cut Pro X has added 3D title creation, which is pretty spiffy, letting you extrude 2D titles and rotate them on three axes. Corel VideoStudio in its latest version also adds 3D Titling, though not as powerful as Apple's. PowerDirector's Title Designer offers transparency, gradient color, border, blur level, and reflection in titles; Magix has impressive title templates, complete with animations. Premiere Elements offers a nifty title effect in which your video fills the text characters, and Corel recently followed suit in VideoStudio 2019. Look for an application that lets you edit titles in WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) mode, so that you can type, format, and time it right over the video preview.

Gathering Speed

Video editing is one of the most computing-intensive activities around, so you'll want the best laptop or desktop you can afford if you're serious about cutting your own movies. Most applications help speed up the editing process by creating a proxy file of lower resolution, so that normal editing and previewing aren't slowed down by the huge full-resolution files.

Particularly intensive is the process of rendering your finished product into a standard video file that will by playable on the target device of choice, be that an HDTV, a laptop, or a smartphone. Most of the software can take advantage of your computer's graphics processor to speed this up. Be sure to check the performance section in each review linked here to see how speedy or slow the application is. In rendering speed testing, CyberLink and Pinnacle have been my perennial champs.

Other measures of performance include startup time and simple stability. Again, video editing is a taxing activity for any computer, involving many components. In the past, video editing programs took longer than most other apps to start up, and unexpected shutdowns were unfortunately common, even in top apps from top developers such as Adobe and Apple. The stability situation has greatly improved, but the complexity of the process, which increases as more powerful effects are added, means crashes will likely never be fully eliminated, and they often raise their ugly heads after a program update, as I found with the latest version of Pinnacle Studio.

Free Video Editing Software

If you don't want to invest a lot of money and effort into your video editing exploits, there are a few free options. Of course, if you use a Mac, the excellent iMovie comes with it. For PC users, Windows 10's Photos app (as of the Fall Creators Update) lets you join, trim, and even add background music, 3D animated effects, and titles to video.

There are also some free video apps on the Windows Store, including Movie Moments, PowerDirector Mobile, Movie Maker, and Magix Movie Edit Touch. Some of these are quite basic, but the Magix app is fairly capable, with clip joining, transitions, and effects, in a very touch-friendly interface.

Free video editing software often comes with legal and technical limitations, however. Some widely used codecs require licensing fees on the part of the software maker, meaning they can't offer free software that can handle these standard file formats. That said, the impressive open-source Shotcut does a lot of the same things that the paid applications in this roundup do, including things like chroma-keying and picture-in-picture. Shotcut is completely open-source and free, while another free option, Lightworks has paid options that remove a 720p output resolution limit. Note also that both Shotcut and Lightworks run on Linux as well as Windows and Mac.

What About Apple?

Though Mac users don't have the sheer number of software choices available for PCs, Apple fans interested in editing video are well served, by four products in particular. At the entry level, the surprisingly capable and enjoyable-to-use iMovie comes free with every Mac sold since at least 2011. iMovie only offers two video tracks, but does good job with chroma-keying, and its Trailers feature makes it easy to produce slick, Hollywood-style productions.

In the midrange, there's Adobe Premiere Elements, which is cross-platform between Macs and PCs, and offers a lot more features and lots of help with creating effects. Professionals and prosumers have powerful, though pricey options in Final Cut Pro X and Adobe Premiere Pro. Final Cut is a deceptively simple application that resembles iMovie in its interface and ease of use, but it offers massively deep capabilities, and many third-party apps integrate with it for even more power. It also makes excellent use of the Touch Bar on the latest MacBook Pro, as shown in photo above. Premiere Pro uses a more traditional timeline and adds a large ecosystem of companion apps and plug-ins. It also excels in collaboration features.

Audio Editing

We still live in the days of talkies, so you want to be able to edit the audio in your digital moves as well as the images. Most of the products included here offer canned background music, and many, such as Pinnacle Studio, can even tailor the soundtrack to the exact length of your movie. All of these programs can separate audio and video tracks, and most can clean up background noise and add environmental audio effects such as concert hall reverb. A couple of the products have an auto-ducking feature, which lowers background music during dialog—a definite pro-level plus.

What's Not Here

There are more video editing software applications than we can fit into this roundup of the best options, which includes only software rated three stars and higher. The best known among them is probably Vegas Movie Studio, which was recently acquired by Magix from Sony. Sony's product used a very cluttered interface that more resembled high-end professional video editing software from the early days of the craft. Magix has made some progress in simplifying it and bringing it up to par with the competition, but more work is needed for it to be included here.

Another program, VSDC Video Editor Pro, simply has too outdated an interface, making common tasks difficult. Longtime pro video editors will note the absence of Avid Media Composer, which is simply too unwieldy for PCMag's primarily consumer audience. There are a couple of more interesting applications—NCH VideoPad and AVS Video Editor among them—that we simply haven't tested yet.

The Finish Line

Best free antivirus for mac 2015. The video editing application you choose depends on your budget, the equipment you're using, and how serious you are. Fortunately, you're spoiled for choice with the products available. Peruse our in-depth reviews of enthusiast-level video editing software reviews linked below to see which is the right one for you.

One final note about the features table at the top of this story: Check marks represent differentiating, above-the-call-of-duty features, rather than essential ones. So, just because Nero Video and Wondershare Filmora don't have any checks, it doesn't mean they're not good choices. In fact, both offer decent basic editing on a budget.