The ever useful folks at Digital Rebellion have just released what for many might be one of the most useful tools ever. It’s a utility that helps diagnose problems with Apple’s Crapressor …. sorry, I meant Compressor.

I have made no secret of my less-than-love-attitude for Apple’s Compressor. It’s incredibly useful and does a great job at many of its compression tasks but it has a terrible reputation for breaking. One day you go to submit a batch and suddenly it won’t submit:

There are threads all over the Apple Compressor support forums with people having the same problems. I finally found a fix that seemed to work for me and a lot of others. It’s a bit involved though and isn’t a 100% guaranteed solution.

In comes Digital Rebellion’s new utility Compressor Repair. What does it do? From the Digital Rebellion website:

  • Checks for missing Qmaster files.
  • Checks for incorrect permissions and fixes them.
  • Resets Qmaster.
  • Manually launches qmasterd.
  • Trashes Compressor preferences (optional).

I haven’t used the utility since my Compressor installs (knock, knock) are working. But anything that can help diagnose and repair the dreaded Compressor-breakage is a good thing. And the guys over at Digital Rebellion make some great products.

UPDATE: Version 1.0.1 has been posted with a bug fix.