Since I just got a Mac Mini, I’d like to be inspired by your ideas and opinions. Let’s start a thread about music software with a nice, clean interface. What software do you think is just as good as hardware, and what would you no longer be able to work comfortably without?
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Ableton. - slick UI for 20+ years. It’s the same on all supported platforms because they have their own UI toolkit. I’m only slightly trolling.
I’m just getting into OcenAudio - nice, simple audio editor.
VLC. - realky useful but mediocre UI.
DSP Quattro - great value, loads of neat features, shitty UI
TBH I’m struggling to recommend any native Mac softeare right now. Partly because drunk after a work xmas do, partly because there is none. The Mac software scene used to be better. The best apps now are cross platform.
Apple’s audio subsystem is still good. Core audio still works; the Audio MIDI Setup app still does useful audio interface aggregation…
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Two knobs and a pic of a funny sausage. What more do you need 
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Things by Cultured Code is a very nice, Mac-only lists app, if you like managing lists. It’s got a Mac-ish UI (although it has never followed the operating system’s core design language. Projects, tags, a decent scheduking system.
If you’re into project planning, OmniPlan from Omni Group is very expensive but feature rich. It’s a but clunky to use but offers Gantt Charts, budgeting and similar “serious” level tools. Omni have a bunch of other pro “office” tools for planning, diagramming, etc. there’s probably cheaper, web based alternatives now but they were “peak Mac” for years.
I use iTerm2 rather than the stock Terminal app. It’s the best terminal replacement I’ve found.
Transmit from Panic is a good Mac native FTP client. I think it helps you manage a range of file sharing protocols these days, but if I’m honest, I’ve not used it for years. Who uses fro these days?
Panic also make a text/code editor for Macs, called Nova. I wanted to like it and it’s pretty slick… but the cross-platform Sublime Text is uglier-but-faster, with better text rendering. If you’re not a coder, these things wont mean much to you. Also, TBH, I use VSCode the most now, and feel slightly dirty for it.
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i have been down this rabbit hiole a few times and tend to go back to hardware - the only softwre i use all the time is audacity as it seems claen to me and simple enoiugh for my purposes - that said i cannot finish a track! everyting is live jam to stereo using audacity for fake mastering
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Only software I use (apart from tools like firmware updaters, transfer tools, etc.) is Ableton, and I like it for it’s no-nonsense, minimalist, clean, business-like UI.
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its all clean in 2D. Just wipe the screen with a cloth.
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XLD
Free audio format conversion tool, with excellent MP3 algos, top notch SRC too.
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The cleanest UI is when the computer is off.
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Assuming your Mini has an Apple processor and your DAW supports AUv3 plugins, I strongly recommend Olympia Noise Co. Patterning 3 and Humbletune Tardigrain. Both have useful visualizations and clear-although-not-minimal user interfaces.
Also, Sinevibes recently started supporting other operating systems, but they were Mac-only for quite a while and all their plugins have intuitive, clean UIs. They also cover areas that a lot of other tools don’t: barber-pole modulation, reverse delays, through-zero flanging, etc.
As far as what I can’t live without, right now that’s just Ableton Live. And I will give them some credit for having a clean UI — I’ve learned Reaper, Reason, Live, and Logic (in that order), and Live has the only DAW interface I actually like.
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I don’t know many softwares, but I can recognize some good UI 
Valhalla VST makes it easy to dial an impressive free reverb.
My own favorite UI are Fors plugins: I can’t see what to not love in these.
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Airwindows
Then the opposite end of the spectrum. Dmt in plugin form 
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Synplant
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Logic Pro 11. The new session player feature is really cool.
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My “all-day” app for work (code editor), and I really love their fast and slick UI. Written from scratch in Rust.
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And if you want an equally slick and fast terminal app there is Ghostty. Crazy inspiring project by Mitchell Hashimoto, written in Zig (which is an amazing language and deserves more press).
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This looks fairly clean. Since it’s an open source project done in someone’s spare time, it will suffer from bugs that may or may not be fixed as quickly as a commercial project will be. Plus, since it is an sequencer, it can’t deal with recorded samples that smoothly and comprehensively compared to a conventional DAW. Think of it as like an alternative to MuseScore, but without using staff notation, and with microtonal capabilities catered for almost by default.
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Interesting. I’m a longtime Logic user. I think the UI is pretty bad.
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I vote for Ableton. I also like Zebra 3. Oh, and Fabfilter plugins.
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