Status-Q

I must be just the sort of customer Apple love, I think. Having had fun playing with iMovie, I long ago upgraded to Final Cut Express, and I’m a big fan of Aperture, their offering for those who need more than iPhoto.

This week I decided to splash out on Logic Studio, which is a substantial upgrade from GarageBand, and I’m looking forward to getting to grips with it. A key part of the decision was that it includes Soundtrack Pro which is an exceedingly powerful audio editor/mixer and has good facilities for creating video soundtracks. The package isn’t cheap, but some of the individual components used to cost substantially more on their own in the not-too-distant past. And hey, who knows when I might have to mix a 5.1-surround soundtrack to my home movies! One thing was clear, though, I really needed to replace my miscellaneous cheap mic pre-amps, phantom power units etc with a better audio interface if I were to make the most of Logic.

The default manufacturer of such kit for amateurs like me is usually M-Audio – I have some other bits from them, and their Fasttrack Pro USB interface was recommended on Gear Media Tech.

But USB is almost always an inferior technology to Firewire, especially if you’re concerned about latencies or the number of channels. It’s something PC owners often have to live with, but Macs all have Firewire, so I thought about the M-Audio Firewire 410, which you can buy from the Apple Store or, at nearly half the price, from StudioSpares. However, as I read up on this, people seemed divided on whether M-Audio are good value for money, or just cheap, and in addition, they had taken a very long time coming up with Leopard drivers for the 410.

So in the end, I went for the Edirol FA-66, also available from Studiospares. (It doesn’t need any drivers for Mac OS X.)

On my first quick experiments, I’m very pleased. It does everything I wanted and more. All I need now is some talent to go with it!

About a year ago I wrote about my experiments with getting a Sony PRS500 Reader talking to my Mac.

Quietly, over that time, it’s been getting easier, as Kovid Goyal has turned his rather unexcitingly-named libprs500 from a basic command-line utility to a full-featured GUI application, which can do things like capture RSS feeds and format them for the Sony. It still has some quirks, but is well-worth checking out, and it runs on Windows, Mac and Linux.

One of the most interesting technology developments of the last couple of weeks has, it seems to me, attracted very little attention. The BBC’s iPlayer, which lets you watch most of the last week of BBC TV if you’re in the UK, and a subset of it if you’re elsewhere, received early criticism because it didn’t work on anything but Windows.

Now at least some of it works on other platforms, but the latest one is the most interesting. It now works on the iPod Touch and iPhone. I now carry around in my shirt pocket something which gives me an eminently watchable archive of the last week’s TV, as long as I’m in range of a wifi network. The iPod Touch is a great video player and now, for free, there’s a huge amount of stuff available in a rather high-quality format.

Only a very few years ago, the idea of having any access to an archive like this would have seemed amazing. But having it on a beautiful slab a few millimetres thick is almost sci-fi. I just wish I had the time to watch any of it! But we do live in most interesting times…