When Apple Computer first incorporated, Apple Corps, the Beatles' record company, complained, but Apple assured them that they would never get into music. Apple, Inc. is now the largest music retailer in the world, soon to include the Beatles' music in their iTunes store.

But how can you get the most out of your music collection? Enter Hear from Joesoft for Apple's Macintosh. Hear offers a complete sound management system to maximize the quality of not only your music, but all of the sound on your Mac.

In essence, Hear is a graphic equalizer in the sense that Godzilla is a lizard. Hear adds quality to your Mac's audio beyond the file's quality, adding fidelity, surround sound, and offering adjustments for the locations of the speakers in your home and the distance between them.Even cheap computer speakers can benefit from these enhancements, giving them a much fuller sound that they're normally capable of. Dozens of presents offer a wide variety of settings to start from, after which you can tweak them to your liking and save as a new preset.

While this sounds great for iTunes, Hear works with every application on your Mac. If you're watching video in your browser or QuickTime Player, doing voice chat in iChat, or watching a DVD with DVD Player, Hear will enhance the sound of any of those applications as well.

While Hear does exactly what it advertises, it's not a perfect package. An application like this should be able to run transparently as a background application and just offer a menu item to switch presets instead of having to keep switching away from whatever application you're listening to. Even an option to control-click the dock item and choose a preset from there would allow users to remain in the application of choice.

Also, while it offers individual volume control for each running application it doesn't allow a separate preset to automatically enhance that application. For example, if I have a music preset for iTunes and want to play a video game while listening to music, I'll want to use one of the video game presets for that game at the same time, but Hear can't use more than one preset at a time. Also, if I'm listening to a podcast in iTunes using one of the podcast presets and then decide to go watch an episode of Speed Racer on Hulu.com, I have to first switch to Hear and change my preset before watching the show. This constant switching to the application just shouldn't be necessary.

I'd also like to see better integration with iTunes to allow for different presets to be set for different songs or podcasts.

If you'd like to squeeze some better audio out of your Mac, Hear will definitely enhance your experience. The Virtual Subwoofer may even save you money on new speakers. That said, you have to be something of an audiophile to really justify spending money on this application, given the $50 price tag. If you're not sure, try out the demo, and decide whether it's worth the price.