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Issue link: https://digital.macdirectory.com/i/898
58 MacDirectory INTERVIEW AMBROSIA SOFTWARE > AN INTERVIEW WITH ANDREW WELCH Andrew Welch is the CEO of Ambrosia Software, a well-respected company in the game and productivity software area, based in Rochester, N.Y. Recently he agreed to a telephone interview from his office with MacDirectory. MacDirectory > Do you consider Ambrosia Software a game company, a utility company or what? Andrew Welch > We do both. We are focusing more on the professional utility end because that is something that has been working out really well for us. We are a split personality in that we have productivity tools as well as anti- productivity - games. MD > Is Wiretap Studio one of your more recent productions? AW > Wiretap Studio is our most recent release and it has been going fantastically. It's a nice product and pretty easy to use. The training videos really help someone to understand the program. For people who just want to set something up and record it, it's pretty nice. The technically oriented person can go a long way with it also. If you spend a couple days with it, I am sure you will become very comfortable. It's very easy to crop the audio - all you need to do is drag the crop markers. Let's say you have recorded a conversation or you have recorded a bit of audio and you've got too much recorded - let's say you are making a ringtone for your cell phone or a system beep for your computer - so maybe you record audio from one of your favorite movies and you want to isolate just the sound that you want to be your ring tone or a system beep for your computer. Cropping lets you do that. It lets you say, "this is the part of the audio that I want. I have this long audio recording and what part of it do I want to be my final sound clip?" MD > You have another utility program called iToner. AW > Yes we do. iToner is a product that allows you to use custom ringtones on your iPhone. The only way to get any kind of a custom ring on your iPhone is to buy a piece of music from the iTunes Music Store. You are limited to whatever kind of music Apple sells at the store and you are limited to a small subset that you can pay 99 cents per ringtone to turn it into a ringtone. The nice thing about iToner is you can use anything. You can download an MP3, you can record your kid laughing. You can do whatever you want and use iToner to put it on your iPhone as a custom ringtone. One of the things people do is make custom ringtones for particular people. You might have a certain sound clip that plays when your wife is calling, or when your kids are calling or whatever, just so you can identify who's calling. It's kind of handy in that way. The real benefit of iToner is that it will let you take any sound clip and turn it into a ringtone. There's nothing else out there that will let you do that. MD > Apple came along with iTunes 7.5 and the iPhone and blocked iToner. INTERVIEW BY E. LEE GRIGGS SNAPZ PRO