Topic: Yes I have a Mac, where to go from here...

[whatapiper]

dumb question im sure, but how do you get the live phish artwork to appear on your ipod?  when i got the free mp3  hampton d/l it just appeared once in itunes and on the ipod but the flac does not...

[inourdr]

dumb question im sure, but how do you get the live phish artwork to appear on your ipod?  when i got the free mp3  hampton d/l it just appeared once in itunes and on the ipod but the flac does not...

Highlight all the songs in the iTunes playlist, then drag and drop the artwork to the artwork area in the lower left. This works great when you want the album cover for CD or DLs that don't come with the digital artwork. I also make artwork for my own mixes and add it this way. Hope this helps.

[whatapiper]

where do you copy the livephish art to drag? 

[inourdr]

where do you copy the livephish art to drag? 

I find them online through an image search. Save them to the appropriate file, then drag them over. You might even be able to drag them straight from the internet, can't remember right now.

[whatapiper]

I will give that a shot tonight, thanks for the help. Any other suggestions out there?

[whatapiper]

so im having performance issues, seems like just most applications take too long to get going, like my mac cant multi task.   i saw jedi wrote something about more ram but is that the only way to boost performance?

also, those who do listen to flac files what player do you use?  cog doesnt work and play is weak, dragging folders never works and there is no option to "add files." 

[jedifunk]

increasing RAM is the easiest and fastest and most sure way to increase performance of a computer... if you have too little your whole system can be bogged down by this

[Alumni]

so im having performance issues, seems like just most applications take too long to get going, like my mac cant multi task.   i saw jedi wrote something about more ram but is that the only way to boost performance?

+1 for the RAM suggestion. It's cheap enough these days that there's no reason to be running less than 4GB, especially if you multitask a lot and play around with uncompressed media files.

The other way is to upgrade the hard drive. Almost without exception, it's the slowest component on any contemporary notebook or desktop. If you can spare the cash, an SSD will cut down application load times dramatically. The best bet is (still) probably the Intel X-25M. My ideal setup is a small-medium sized SSD (or a large one if money really is no object) for the OS and Apps and a large external drive for media, connected by Firewire or eSata.

[jephrey]

There's a package out there at what.cd that contains a bunch of mac utilities, players, EAC stuff, etc.

They're down for maintenance but it's a nice comprehensive list with descriptions and details.  I'll post those descriptions of each if it's back up and nobody else has by then.

I've kind of maxed out on ram myself, but even my load times on this G5 aren't terrible.  Do you have snow leopard?  That's supposed to be a big deal.  But I'll agree that ram is the simplest addition to improve your speeds.

[whatapiper]

There's a package out there at what.cd that contains a bunch of mac utilities, players, EAC stuff, etc.

They're down for maintenance but it's a nice comprehensive list with descriptions and details.  I'll post those descriptions of each if it's back up and nobody else has by then.

I've kind of maxed out on ram myself, but even my load times on this G5 aren't terrible.  Do you have snow leopard?  That's supposed to be a big deal.  But I'll agree that ram is the simplest addition to improve your speeds.

i dont have leopard, im still using what came in teh box, 1gb ram so no wonder eh?   

money is def an issue, Im waiting for YNAB 3 to come out to get my shit together, im mad in debt but make enough money not to be so go figure.   im trying to make either 8, MSG, or Miami come true so i cant go crazy here, YNAB is essential based on the reviews i have read.

so whats the cheapest way to boost, leopard only costs what $29?  does that come with more ram? i will check it out, otherwise maybe just the ram.  i have a tb external that all my music goes on that isnt archived to dvd.   only wav files and flacs waiting to transfer sit on the mac drive....

ups for all, thanks for the time

[Mr Minor]

so im having performance issues, seems like just most applications take too long to get going, like my mac cant multi task.   i saw jedi wrote something about more ram but is that the only way to boost performance?

also, those who do listen to flac files what player do you use?  cog doesnt work and play is weak, dragging folders never works and there is no option to "add files."

I am currently having a similar issue.  My iMac G5 is just about 5 years old.  I have an appointment at the Apple Store on Wed to try and figure out the issue. I upgraded RAM memory to 2 Gig and it helped for a while.  The first idea was to start from scratch, reboot all programs and see if that works.  We'll see.
I also think there are some issues with my power source.  If I put it to sleep it won't fire back up.  I had this issue before but it was still under Apple Care warranty and there was a recall on the part.  We'll see about how much $it might cost on Wed.  It might be time for an upgrade for mr. minor!

[jephrey]

If you don't already have leopard, I don't think you can get snow leopard for $29.  I'm assuming you have an intel mac.

The cheapest really is ram.

Here are some utilities, Vox looks cool.

Ripping / Transcoding

X Lossless Decoder (XLD)

X Lossless Decoder (XLD) is a tool for Mac OS X that is able to decode/convert/play various 'lossless' audio files. The supported audio files can be split into tracks with a cue sheet when decoding. XLD is What.CD's recommended CD ripping software for Mac OS X.

XLD supports the following formats:

 FLAC

 Monkey's Audio

 Wavpack

 TTA

 Apple Lossless

 AIFF, WAV


Max

Max is an application for creating high-quality audio files in various formats, from compact discs or files.

When extracting audio from compact discs, Max offers the maximum in flexibility to ensure the true sound of your CD is faithfully extracted. For pristine discs, Max offers a high-speed ripper with no error correction. For damaged discs, Max can either use its built-in comparison ripper (for drives that cache audio) or the error-correcting power of cdparanoia.

Once the audio is extracted, Max can generate audio in over 20 compressed and uncompressed formats including MP3, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, AAC, Apple Lossless, Monkey's Audio, WavPack, Speex, AIFF, and WAVE.

Spectral Analysis / File Analysis

Audacity

Audacity is a digital audio editor and recording application. Audacity is cross-platform and is available for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and BSD.

Some of Audacity's features include:

 Importing and exporting WAV, AIFF, MP3 (via the LAME encoder, downloaded separately), Ogg Vorbis, all file formats supported by libsndfile library

 Version 1.3.2 also supports Free Lossless Audio Codec (FLAC)

 Recording and playing sounds

 Editing via Cut, Copy, Paste (with unlimited Undo)

 Multi-track mixing

 A large array of digital effects and plug-ins. Additional effects can be written with Nyquist

 Amplitude envelope editing

 Noise removal

 Support for multi-channel modes with sampling rates up to 96 kHz with 24 bits per sample

 The ability to make precise adjustments to the audio's speed while maintaining pitch (Audacity calls it changing tempo), in order to synchronize it with video, run for the right length of time, etc.

 The ability to change the audio's pitch without changing the speed.

 Contains major features of modern multi-track audio software [7] including navigation controls, zoom and single track edit, project pane and XY project navigation, non-destructive and destructive effect processing, audio file manipulation (cut, copy, paste)

 Converting cassette tapes or records into digital tracks by automatically splitting one wav (or the other supported types) track into multiple tracks based on silences in the track and the export multiple option.


MediaInfo

MediaInfo supplies technical and tag information about a video or audio file.
It is free software (free of charge and free access to source code: GPL or LGPL license).

What information can I get from MediaInfo?

 General: title, author, director, album, track number, date, duration...

 Video: codec, aspect, fps, bitrate...

 Audio: codec, sample rate, channels, language, bitrate...

 Text: language of subtitle

 Chapters: number of chapters, list of chapters


What format (container) does MediaInfo support?

 Video: MKV, OGM, AVI, DivX, WMV, QuickTime, Real, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DVD (VOB)...

 Codecs: DivX, XviD, MSMPEG4, ASP, H.264, AVC...)

 Audio: OGG, MP3, WAV, RA, AC3, DTS, AAC, M4A, AU, AIFF...

 Subtitles: SRT, SSA, ASS, SAMI...


Media Player

Songbird

Songbird is a free and open source software audio player and web browser founded by Rob Lord and developed by Pioneers of the Inevitable (with members who previously developed for both Winamp and the Yahoo! Music Engine), with a stated mission "to incubate Songbird, the first Web player, to catalyze and champion a diverse, open Media Web."

Songbird employs Mozilla's XULRunner platform, and is thus capable of running on Microsoft Windows, Apple Mac OS X, Solaris and Linux. Songbird utilizes the GStreamer media framework. Apple iPhones, iPod Touch and Microsoft Zune devices are not yet supported.

Vox

Vox is a little and simple music player for Mac OS X with support for many file types, including FLAC, MP3, AAC, Musepack, Monkey's Audio, OGG Vorbis, Apple Lossless, AIFF, WAV, IT, MOD, XM, Games Music and many others. Includes numerous effects like Equalizer, Reverb, Time Stretch, Pitch Shift, Echo. Moreover, all supported files can be exported to MP3, AAC, WAV and other formats with enabled effects.

VLC Media Player

VLC media player is a highly portable multimedia player and multimedia framework capable of reading most audio and video formats (MPEG-2, MPEG-4, H.264, DivX, MPEG-1, mp3, ogg, aac ...) as well as DVDs, Audio CDs VCDs, and various streaming protocols.

Tagging / File Management

Tag

Tag is a metadata editor for FLAC, Ogg Vorbis, Monkey's Audio and WavPack files.

Tag has an intuitive interface that simplifies common editing tasks while also allowing direct manipulation of tags. Tags can be dragged between files, or Tag can even add all the tags contained in one file to another in one fell swoop.

For files with incomplete or missing metadata, Tag can guess tag values by matching the filename to a user-defined pattern. Alternatively, Tag can rename files by substituting tag values into a user-defined pattern.

Need to make many parallel changes? No problem! Tag can edit multiple files simultaneously, eliminating repetition and saving time.

For advanced users Tag features customizable mappings that allow you to specify which tags are mapped to the various fields in the user interface.

PicardTagger

Picard is the next generation MusicBrainz tagging application. This new tagging concept is album oriented, as opposed to track/file oriented like the ClassicTagger. Picard is written in Python, which is a cross-platform language, and makes use of cross-platform libraries - this allows the same code to run both on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.

Dnuos

Dnuos is a console program that creates lists of music collections, based on directory structure.

The list format is completely customizable and can be plain text or HTML.

Dnuos supports MP3, AAC, Musepack, Ogg Vorbis, and FLAC audio files. Quality profile detection is also supported, including LAME quality preset information.

Audio file information is saved to disk after a list is made for the first time, making subsequent lists much faster to generate. Only audio files and directories that have been changed since the last list was made are analyzed.

See wiki.php?action=article&id=61 for information on using Dnuos.

Internet Relay Chat (IRC)

Colloquy

Traditionally, chat clients on the Mac have been anything but glamorous. Colloquy is an advanced IRC, SILC & ICB client which aims to fill this void. By adhering to Mac OS X interface conventions, Colloquy has the look and feel of a quality Mac application.

X-Chat Aqua

X-Chat Aqua is X-Chat with an Aqua interface for Mac OS X. X-Chat Aqua uses the IRC engine from X-Chat, and is designed to look and feel like the GTK+ front end.

[Caravan2001]

DL'd Virtual DJ tonight off a torrent sight...shit, this app is tight!!!  Will probably cause me to have a lot of late nights!

[whatapiper]

Wow, thanks everyone! This weekend I will play around a bit. I asked apple care about more ram and they told me it would cost 200 to instal on site. He said I could also do it myself for a fraction of the cost.    How difficult would it be to do myself? I'm assuming I have to take part of the monitor apart

[rowjimmy]

If you have Tiger, you can still upgrade from the $29 disc:
http://ptech.allthingsd.com/20090826/apple-changes-leopards-spots/