Macking 76

Recording Vinyl and Tape
My aging beige G3 is serving me quite well at this, using an old version of SoundEdit 16 that still runs under 9.1. I have a huge collection of vinyl, and over a hundred hours of old Firesign Theater radio shows, and Doctor Demento radio shows, which I captured live back in the early '70s.
I am converting these to digital format, ripping them with SoundJam (iTunes will also work), and posting them to Usenet, in addition to supplying copies to Firesign and Doctor D, who are glad that I saved all that stuff.
Are you a long-time archivist? What do you have from the past that you recorded off the air in YOUR collection? You may have something that exists NO WHERE ELSE. My 30-year-old C-120 cassettes are in remarkably good shape; yours may be too. Strangely, reel-to-reel tapes from the same era are decaying badly as the glue that holds the magnetic media to the tape becomes sticky, ruining the tape.
The process is simple: Get an old stereo system and feed the output into the microphone port in your Mac. Make sure you have at least 6 gigs free so SoundEdit has room for its scratch file as well as the files you save. Once you have ripped them to MP3, you can toss the AIFF files, and burn the MP3s to CD. I use 256 as the minimum setting for monaural recording so no audible quality is lost. After all, the C-120s were not all that great at preserving the higher frequencies so you aren't losing anything.
If you have a newer Mac with no microphone port, you can get a USB-to-audio device, but beware: these are not as plug-and-play as we would like.
If you would like to reduce noise and pops from vinyl recordings, TidBITS recommends Cubase VST from Steinberg Virtual Studio. However, it must be staggeringly expensive because they do not put the price anywhere on their web site. However, the program includes all you need to do recording, so you won't need SoundEdit. There are some cheaper products, but I have tried them and none are as flexible or powerful as SoundEdit.
Any version of Toast will let you burn CD-ROMs full of MP3s, but Toast Titanium will let you make music CDs as well as DVDs, which is a whole 'nother ball of wax.
I hope to get a DVD burner next year so I can convert my aging collection of Beta tapes. There are some real treasures on there.

128-bit AirPort Cards
A MacFixit article relates to the new version 128-bit AirPort cards and permanent damage that can result from their installation.
"A thread on Apple's Discussion Boards confirms that several other users have had the same problem we reported yesterday - where Apple's new 128-bit AirPort cards essentially disables the Mac. Generally, removing the card restores functionality. New iBooks appear especially likely to have this problem.
"Patrick Gallagher (Micro/Mac Warehouse/Apple Certified Tech Support) is one of the users who posted to the Apple thread. He also e-mailed this directly to us (MacFixIt):
'I installed a 128-bit Airport card in my G4/500 and with the card inserted, the G4 would not boot...gets power but no video (and PRAM wouldn't zap). Thinking it may be a bad card, I tried a 40-bit card out of my wife's iMac and same thing, no video, take the card out and it boots fine. My 128-bit card wouldn't work in the iMac either (no power). I used to have an AirPort card in my G4 months ago so I know it used to work. So I take the new 128-bit AirPort card to work and installed it in one of our G4/400s (Gigabit) and same thing...no video. Put the old AirPort card back in and same thing. So basically, both G4s I put this card into it killed the AirPort slots, luckily it didn't harm the iMac too. My G4 was out of warranty but Apple is replacing my logic board anyway since it was a new AirPort card that did it in (and replaced the card too of course).'
Patrick's report is more serious, as it means a defective card may actually permanently harm a logic board! Clearly, not all the new cards have this problem, but it looks like at least a batch of them will lead to trouble. We advise caution until Apple offers an official statement on this matter."
I have not personally seen this harm occur, but if you buy a new AirPort card and experience this problem, call Apple for support immediately.

Run Mac OS X on older Macs
While we'd like to believe everything that Apple tells us, we've recently discovered that they might have been fudging a little with the system requirements for Mac OS X. Granted, out of the box, you can't run the new operating system on anything that doesn't have at least a G3 processor. But Ryan Rempel, the OS X guru at Other World Computing, has put together kernel extensions that make the OS work on many earlier PCI-based machines, including 7300, 7500, 7600, 8500, 8600, 9500 and 9600. The extensions even allow you to run Mac OS X on clones that were based on one of these systems (like the Umax S900 and J700, and the Power Computing PowerWave and PowerTowerPro). He did so by taking the source code Apple provided with the Darwin project and hacked around a little bit until he was able to get everything working as expected.
To begin your foray into Mac OS X with a 'legacy' machine, go to the Other World Computing Mac OS X for Legacy Macs page.
Download the new installation software, forebodingly named Unsupported UtilityX. Then run it and install Mac OS X from the regular install CD. Once it is installed, however, you should expect it to be dog slow. After all, there IS a reason why Apple doesn't support X on older Macs, and that's it.
You should also download the L2CacheConfig utility from the same Web page. This application enables L2 cache under Mac OS X for G3 and G4 upgrade cards.
Mac tip from Element K Journals, MacAuthority, your "number one source for software tips and techniques." Go to their web site for a FREE issue of The MacAuthority.

OS 10.1
I have been running this since Thursday, and have noticed a real improvement in speed. There are new features and new preferences: for instance, the Dock can be moved to the side of the screen instead of just the bottom. Volume control is now in the menubar. System Preferences is very different in appearance and more options have been added.

Mozilla
I have been using this on my iBook under OSX 10.0.4 since last month, and find it is excellent. I have had no trouble with it so far, and it reads every page I throw at it.
Unfortunately, my 9.1 desktop did not fare so well. There was a bug in it that made it repeatedly crash on startup after working fine for a couple of weeks. However, I reinstalled it and am okay again. Probably ought to wait for the next revision for 9.1, but you X users can get it now and not have to use the largely incomplete OmniWeb or Microsoft's IE for X. Yes, it works fine on 10.1.

DVD Settlement
iMac DV, iMac DV SE, and G4 owners
YOU MAY BE ELIGIBLE FOR SETTLEMENT BENEFITS
TO: Anyone in the United States who bought or received a new iMac DV or iMacDV SE, or a Power Mac G4 system that included a software DVD player using the Mac OS 9.0.3 operating system (or earlier) and a DVD player version 2.1 (or earlier) ("the Class").
If you purchased one of these computers before May 2000, you are probably eligible for settlement benefits. This does not apply to resellers.
There is a proposed settlement of a class action lawsuit against Apple Computer, Inc. involving issues with DVD playback in earlier models of the Apple iMac DV, iMac DV SE and Power Mac G4 computers. A Notice explaining how you can receive a free fix for these issues as well as other settlement benefits is available.
For more info visit http://appledvdsettlement.rosenthalco.com/.

More Are Abandoning Windows
A recent Gartner Group report recommends that businesses that must provide a Web presence should look for a different solution than one based upon Windows products, since patches must be applied almost weekly to correct bugs and security lapses.
Briefly, the Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS, jokingly referred as standing for "It's InSecure) is so poorly designed, and so vulnerable to attacks, that anyone actually using it has to apply updated patches every week, and even then they can count on serious worms taking out the server frequently.
Apache, available for OS X Server, Linux and others, does not suffer from these security holes.
"10 percent of computer users are Mac users, but remember, we are the top 10 percent." - Douglas Adams

No Microsoft products were used in the production of this column.

email mp at moonmac dot com. (I took out the mailto link because that's how the spammers find me.)