A documentary shoot is the reason this app exists.
Mics, a plan, and the intent to shoot it the way the East Village clubs taught anyone to shoot anything — fast, mean, on the budget of a confession. The math was clean right up until the audio chain hit the Mac. Then the math stopped being clean.
Every audio levels meter for macOS on offer 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 the subject, the lav on whoever just got put in the chair — each one needs its own honest meter, and ideally each one lands on disk as its own WAV so dialogue editing isn't archaeology later.
So Weirdo got built. It's on the Mac App Store now, and the ask is simple: anybody who runs sound for anything, take it to a real set and break 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's 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 the room is rolling without anyone yelling across it. Nobody likes being yelled at on their 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 you're 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 the shoot is in a club after midnight and the soundcheck is whatever the bartender is playing.
