The Lovro rockumentary is the reason this app exists.
He came through with a set of lavs and a plan. He'd mic himself and whatever beautiful disaster we put in the frame. I'd light him immortal. We'd shoot it like the East Village clubs taught us to shoot anything — fast, mean, with the budget of a confession. The math was clean until the audio chain hit the Mac, and then the math stopped being clean.
Every audio levels meter for macOS I tried was either DAW-priced bloatware that needs three Pro Tools plugins to wake up, or some shareware VU widget that lies about peaks by the time you notice them. Neither answers the only two questions you actually have on a set: am I clipping? and what is each channel doing right now, in real decibels, before tape? The booms, the lavs on Lovro, the lav on whoever Lovro just put in the chair — each of them needs its own honest meter, and ideally each of them lands on disk as its own WAV so dialogue editing isn't archaeology later.
So I built Weirdo. And it's now on the Mac App Store, and I am asking you — anybody reading this who runs sound for anything — to break it on a real set and tell me what's wrong with it.
→ Download Weirdo on the Mac App Store
Free. macOS. Works with any input macOS can see — USB condenser, two-channel interface, 32-channel rig, whatever you've got plugged in.
The Two Questions, Answered Honestly
A dedicated CLIP badge fires the moment a channel hits 0 dB. The meter ramps green → amber → red the way a real broadcast meter does, so you see distortion coming before it lands on tape. No subtle indicator buried in a menu. The badge is the entire point — if you're looking at the screen at all, the clip is the thing it tells you.
Each channel saves as its own ISO WAV. Lavs stay isolated from booms. The room mic doesn't drown the lead's whisper. When the edit starts, you're not extracting voices from a stereo bounce — you have the takes the way the mics actually heard them.
Peak hold, peak history, channel labels, and a tally light so the talent knows we're rolling without me yelling across the room. Lovro hates being yelled at on his own set. The tally light keeps the etiquette intact.
The Field-Ready Stuff
80Hz low-cut — kills HVAC rumble, footsteps through the floor, the bass that some New York buildings just have — without touching the human voice band.
Monitor gate — cuts the headphone feed when nothing's coming in, so I'm not listening to interface hiss for nine hours.
Safe phones volume — caps the headphone output so a sudden hot signal doesn't shred your hearing. After enough years of standing next to a Marshall stack, you start protecting whatever your ears have left.
Clean Monitor preset — one tap puts the whole rig into noisy-location-work mode. The kind of mode you want when you're shooting in a club after midnight and the soundcheck is just whatever the bartender is playing.
Local Only. No Exceptions.
Weirdo never uploads audio. Never phones home. Doesn't have an account. Doesn't have analytics. The WAV files save to a folder you pick on your Mac and stay there.
