Installing
Open the disk image and drag Kipowi to Applications. It is signed with a Developer
ID certificate, notarised by Apple and stapled, so it opens without a Gatekeeper
warning even on a machine that is offline.
Needs macOS 14 or later. Universal for Apple silicon and Intel. The download is
71.0 MB, most of which is the MKV decoder and the encoders — that weight is the
reason there is nothing to install alongside it. No VLC, no FFmpeg, no Homebrew, no
codec pack.
0.8.4 finishes the sound settings on every kind of export. WAV and AIFF can be
written at 24, 16 or 8 bits as well as at the source's: eight is the lo-fi one, a
quarter of the size of 32-bit float and audibly grainy, and it measures within a
tenth of a decibel of everything eight bits can do. A movie's soundtrack gets the
same rate and channel settings as a sound file, which matters more than
consistency — Kipowi used to write every movie as stereo at 48 kHz whatever went
in, and said nothing about it. Cut out works properly on a sound file now: the
waveform is redrawn for the clip that is left, level moves follow the sound
rather than staying where they were, and the exported file is the cut version,
which it was not before. And the export panel is three groups — file, picture,
sound — instead of one long list of rows.
0.8.3 let you choose the sample rate and the channels when exporting sound.
Leave the rate at the source's or write 44.1 or 48 kHz: converting is a real
resample, so the pitch and the length stay exactly where they were and only the
number of samples per second changes. Mono sums both sides rather than dropping
one, so a part panned hard to one side does not disappear. Both default to
whatever the file already is, because not converting is always the most faithful
option.
0.8.2 made short samples workable. On a sound effect or a single word — well
under a second — an area could not be marked at all: a level region swallowed every
drag that began inside it, and once one mark covered most of the clip there was
nowhere left to start. A level is taken hold of by the band that shows it now, so the
rest of the waveform stays free to mark. The shortest mark, and how far the timeline
zooms, scale with the clip instead of stopping at a flat twenty milliseconds, and
under a second the readouts are in milliseconds, where hundredths could not tell one
selection from another.
0.8.1 fixed three things about marking a sound. Marking no longer leaves a band
behind each time: a level region sitting at zero changes nothing about what gets
written, so it is the mark and nothing more, and a new mark clears it — pull it to a
level and it stays. A selection and a level edit no longer look alike either: the
stretch in hand is the full-height frame, while a level region is a band whose height
is the change itself, nothing at zero and a tall block at +12 dB. And undo reaches the
sound, which it never did — levels, marks and cuts share one undo now, so Command-Z
takes back whatever you did last.
0.8.0 was about sound. A meter on the picture shows peak and LUFS, so how loud a clip
really is stops being a guess; loudness normalize brings a quiet video up on export, and
the soundtrack can be taken out as its own file or dropped. The waveform zooms with the
timeline, reading the detail off the file rather than
stretching it, so you can pick exactly the piece you want. A marked stretch is drawn as a
frame rather than a faint wash — on a dark screen the wash measured about 1.1:1 against
the background where a control should reach 3:1 — and it follows the system's Increase
contrast setting.
0.7.1 joined the waveform and the timeline up: drag across the waveform to mark a part of
a sound and it sets the in and out points and gets a gain region ready to pull. 0.7.0 can
take a section out of a clip: mark in and out, press Cut out, and the timeline shortens
while playback skips it. It also plays VP9 and AV1 video inside ordinary .mp4
files, opens a spritesheet and plays it, saves a picture's changes back into the file it
came from, and exports pictures at an exact size with presets.
On 0.5.1 or later, use Kipowi › Check for Updates;
on 0.5.0 or earlier, install this version once by hand.
If something is wrong,
tell me.
Source code for the bundled media components
Kipowi carries VLC, VLCKit, FFmpeg and LAME inside the app. Their licences require
the matching source to be available next to the binary, so it is:
Kipowi-0.8.4-Sources.tar.xz
(216 MB), with the patches, dependency sources and build recipes.
You do not need it to run Kipowi. The notices themselves are in the app under
Kipowi › Media Component Licenses.
