Portable Macaw

Designed as the portable counterpart of Macaw, this is small-sized tool which facilitates a workspace for audio composition. It features options for enhancing and adapting sound files to live performances, along with a music synthesizer, sequencer and sampler, among others.

Since there is no setup pack involved, you can save the program files to a custom location on the disk and simply click the EXE file to run Macaw. Otherwise, you can save it to a pen drive or other mass storage device to directly run it on any machine. However, you should know that some DLL files are required.

More importantly, it does not make changes to the Windows registry or create extra files on the computer, thus leaving no traces behind after removing the app.

Macaw is capable of playing and recording MP3 and OGG compressed audio tracks. At startup you can select the sound driver and configure settings in regard to the audio input and output, namely sample rate, latency, along with buffer coarse and line.

What's more, you can customize preferences concerning MIDI input and output devices, media server, and data conversion. These settings can be restored to default.

Macaw puts a lot of handy functions at your disposal. For example, you can examine audio track information, adjust the tempo level, load and play plugins and create new ones, as well as record audio via microphone.

When it comes to WAV, MP3, OGG, AIFF or AU files, it is possible to apply presets and custom effects. Once all modifications are made, you can export the track to MP3 or OGG format, or make samples for each key instead.

There were no stability issues in our evaluation, as Macaw did not hang, crash or pop up error messages. Surprisingly, it uses a low amount of CPU and RAM, so it didn't put a strain on computer performance.

Taking into account its advanced settings, effects, presets and other features, Macaw proves to be a professional-grade program dedicated to composing audio.