Categories
Uncategorized

Consume / Create – Apple Products

Following up on my Consume / Create post, I was thinking about Apple’s current product line, and wanted to graph it out.

Apple Products: Consume / Create

At the far left end is the iPod, which is almost an exclusively “consuming” device. I don’t know what kind of content you could create with an iPod. I mean, you could create content, it’s possible, but I don’t want to think that hard about it. Next up is the iPad, which is a cross between a big iPod and big iPhone. You could create written content, but it’s got no camera, and very limited connectivity in the way of input ports. (See Could No Camera Be an iPad Killer? and Parsons’ Students Shrug Off Apple’s iPad. No Camera, No Creativity) The iPad is a new device, so it’s hard know yet where it will fit into the landscape, so I put it before the iPhone. Now the iPhone has a camera, and you can play music on it, and (possibly) shoot video, and you could type up your novel on it, though you’d likely go mad in the process.

OK, so the iPod, iPad, and iPhone are mostly consuming devices anyway, but two of them let you create things, but there are various levels of “creating” thing, and honestly while my copywriter friend could tap out a killer headline on an iPad, my photographer friend is probably not capturing the next great image on an iPhone. I’m mainly focused on media creation.

We then move on to “real” computers, starting with the MacBook Air. It’s got a camera and one single USB port. I don’t see this is a serious computer for serious media creators. It is a super-lightweight laptop great for the traveler/writer/business person. Skip it. The low-end MacBook (often called “the whitey”) is next. Low-end. It’s got two (yes two!) USB ports, and Gigabit Ethernet, but no Firewire. And, it’s low-end, which means it lacks power. Really. It does. (Luckily, it has a built-in camera!)

I put the Mac mini in there next, as I think it’s a step up from the low-end MacBook. The Mac mini has a bunch of USB ports and a Firewire 800 port, which means I can connect something like a Panasonic HVX200 HD camera and move that footage. I can also connect a Firewire card reader and get 24MB RAW files from a DSLR or RED footage onto it at a reasonable pace. The Mac mini is no powerhouse, but connectivity-wise, it’s moving up the ladder.

We then move onto the iMac and then the MacBook Pro. The iMac is a nice computer, and you can even get one with a 27″ display that’s pretty adept at editing video. I put the MacBook to the right of the iMac, mainly because on the high-end configuration you get the ExpressCard slot, which will let you connect eSata drives, which is a step up from Firewire. The MacBook is obviously better for portability, and the prices (and features) intermingle a bit between the two lines. The latest 27″ iMac is available in a Quad-Core configuration though, which is some serious power, so I’m still not sure of the positioning of these two.

And as long as we’re still talking about that Quad-Core iMac, let’s compare it to the Mac Pro, the granddaddy of Apple’s Creation Stations… If you’re wondering whether you can forget the Mac Pro and just get a top-of-the-line iMac, well, that depends on what you are going to create. You can read Why It’s Still Smart to Buy a Mac Pro and as someone who maintains a Mac Pro with 4 internal drives, an AJA IO card and two G-Tech eS Pros which pulls in footage from the HVX200 as well as the RED ONE, I can tell you I wouldn’t dream of replacing this Mac Pro with an iMac. Not yet anyway…

What about price? Hmmm, I figured it would be worth reorganizing the above graph with cost being the variable.

Apple Products: Cost

Once again, the order isn’t perfect, but I think it’s a quick overview, and worth comparing to the graph above to see how they differ.

Anyway, now that you’re done consuming all these silly words, get out there are create something! From what I hear, it’s easier than ever before, and the equipment you need is cheaper than it’s ever been! :)

Categories
Uncategorized

Consume / Create

Consume / Create

I think a lot about consuming versus creating. Consuming media comes easy to most people. The old world of broadcasting was dependent on consumers: television, radio, newspapers, magazines, books, the music industry, and on and on… they had to do one thing: pump out content that people would consume, and they did it well. 20 years ago if you wanted to create your own media, be it music, photography, writing, whatever, you had a lot of work to do to get any sizable audience to see it. Bands had to physically go out and play, go on tour, put on great shows, play good music, and hope people told their friends. Self-publishing a book 20 years ago? Getting your photos in front of a world-wide audience 20 years ago? How was that done?

Of course the World Wide Web came along and changed things quite a bit. Creating things became much easier, and distributing them even easier! You don’t even need to press vinyl or CDs anymore, or get prints made from your photos, everything is electronic now, and wowza aren’t we that much better off for it! The odd thing is, I almost feel like we’re reaching a point where consuming is overtaking creating, even though it doesn’t have to. I don’t know if it’s due to more “average” people using the web, or people have grown tired, or the novelty has worn off, or people are not staying discontent with the status quo. Creating new things should be more within our reach than ever before, but you’ve still got to have the motivation to do something about it.

I could blame social media. If I want to be a curmudgeon, I could say that 10 years ago I remember reading (and hopefully writing) so many blog posts about what people were creating and doing and ideas and thoughts and stories… and now it’s just simple to write a snarky comment in 140 characters, or click a ‘Like’ button next to someone post. And yeah, I’m guilty of this too, and maybe I feel bad about it sometimes because I’m one of those people who feels this need to create things… I feel like I can’t not try to make new things. They tell me that’s the curse of being creative.

But it’s not all bad… some amazing things happen every now and then. Consider that you can get the equipment to create “professional” level work for a mere fraction of the cost of what it would have taken 20 years ago, and we should be seeing an explosion in creativity. The tools are available, so it’s a matter of the creators getting the tools, and being able to focus on creating rather than consuming. If you’re not careful, consuming can be the enemy of creating.

Categories
Uncategorized

LaCie Drive Failures (and options!)

I got an email from a client asking about LaCie hard drives, as he was pretty sure he’d heard me mention some issue we’ve had with them. Well, we had issues all right, and I let him know about it, but in the interest of letting everyone know about it, I figured I’d post it here…

We have/had about 4 LaCie 1 TB Big Disk Extreme drives, and I think we’ve seen at least 3 power supplies die on them. They use external power bricks, and I won’t lie, we used the heck out of those drives, lots of reading and writing, powered on almost all the time, and occasionally in places where it was probably warmer than it should have been, so I don’t want to fully condemn LaCie for making poor quality components, but the power supplies just could not keep up with us. The drives themselves, all good, no failures there (and that’s the good news) but as for power… argh!

The tricky thing was, at least one of the power supplies didn’t completely die, but just stopped supplying enough juice to get the drive to spin up properly. I’d attach the power cable, turn on the drive, and it would start to spin, then click, and slow down, and start to spin again – this all sounds like a bad disk, and I thought it was – until I tried another power supply, and found out the drive was fine, but the power supply was no longer fully functional. This is something I probably would have never figured out of we’d only had one of these drives. This is another reason I really like to buy multiples of a specific drive model, redundancy!

Luckily LaCie sells replacement power supplies on their web site, but I do wonder how much business they do in power supplies, because we’ve bought at least 3 of them!

I know two other people who have had issues with LaCie drives, but I don’t want that to sway you… Others have had good luck with them, and I’ve still got one LaCie I use for a spare backup drive that has never had an issue. I think it’s always luck of the draw with stuff like this… you’ll find 5 people who say they swear at a specific brand and 5 people who say they swear at a specific brand. Electronics companies seem to always be switching supplies, using cheaper parts, cutting corners, changing components… you never know what you’ll get.

Right now though, if I had to recommend any external hard drives, I’d point you to either Other World Computing’s Mercury Elite or any of the drives by G-Technology. The OWC Mercury Elite drives come in at a number of capacities and price points, and even if you’re budget minded with your crucial data, you should be able to find something that works. The G-Tech drives also come in a variety of capacities and prices, but if you’ve got money to spend, you can get some serious storage…. they come highly recommended.

Categories
Uncategorized

Just Say No RPM!

Sorry folks, No RPM Challenge this year. But honestly, saying “no” this year was more difficult than saying “yes” two years ago, and I didn’t actually officially say “no” until February 28th.

See, I was really looking forward to recording an album in February. I was looking forward to it months ago, and in December, and even in January, but once February hit, it wasn’t looking good.

2008 was easy, I’d just fire up GarageBand, find some drum loops, grab the guitar and bass, and a few hours later, I’d have a song done. I did 10 songs in 2008. 2009 was harder, and I wanted to set my standards a bit higher, but I did manage to do 5 songs, which came out to 35 minutes of music. I was happy with what I produced within the time limits. 2009 was a bit harder as far as getting the time to do it all as well. I think my final mixing session was like 5+ hours straight, and ended after 2am.

Still, I was looking forward to doing it again in 2010, especially since I wanted to dig into Logic 9 a bit more. (Amp Designer and Pedalboard!) But.. and everyone I know has a big but… it just couldn’t happen. Between work, work, work, and the Winter Olympics, and family time, and oh, more work, it just didn’t happen.

I did record a bit, but not enough. Last year I joked that for 2010 I’d just record 1 single 35 minute long song, along the lines of Sleep’s Dopesmoker, but even that couldn’t happen.

I also made the mistake of upgrading to Snow Leopard, which broke my FireWire audio input for two days. So I put in probably 3 or 4 hours fixing that so I could record, instead of actually recording, so by the time I got it working, I had no time to record. The whole month sort of went like that. Even though the Doctor (who doesn’t really appreciate the music I make, but supports me nonetheless) was very supportive. Still didn’t happen. I finally got down to the last weekend of the month, and thought “Hey, I’ve got 2 days, I can do it!” but I ended up spending Saturday driving all over Waukesha County, and the rest of Saturday meeting various deadlines. At that point, I knew all hope was lost. Just to top it off, I was at the office for about 5 hours on Sunday, because on Monday I was involved in probably the most important presentation of my life. That trumped it all, so I really don’t feel too bad about not finishing an album.

The sad thing is, now that I think maybe I’d have some time to record, I need to return the Fender to it’s rightful owner, so I’m out one good guitar. Damn…

Well, there’s always next year!

Categories
Uncategorized

FireWire Audio Headache

February is the month of the RPM Challenge. You know, record an album in a month… I’ve done it before, and was going to do it again, and to do it, I use a Behringer FCA202 FireWire audio interface.

Of course I also decided to upgrade to Snow Leopard this month, and for some odd reason, that rendered the FCA202 useless. It just wouldn’t show up anymore in the System Preferences as an audio input/output device. It did show up as a FireWire device though, so that was odd.

I ended up trying to replace the AppleFWAudio.kext kernel extension, zapped the PRAM, deleted cache files, removed audio units, different cables, using the power supply, tried logging in as another user, and on and on… I rebooted from my 10.5.8 backup and it showed up, so it must have been something specific to 10.6. I tried it on my MacBook Pro (10.6) and… it didn’t show up! Ugh, over to the Mac mini (10.6) and it showed up fine. I gave up for the night, convinced it was a 10.6 issue. The next day I tried it on a Mac Pro and MacBook Pro (both 10.6) and it worked, and then tried again on my MacBook Pro and it worked… so now it seemed that it was just the iMac I normally use to record to that wasn’t working. (I blame the “not working” on my MacBook Pro the night before to being tried/frustrated/bad cabling.)

I was pretty fed up by now, and sick of searching for possible solutions… I did find a post somewhere about the CoreAudio SDK and how it may install/updated the needed audio extensions to fix FireWire audio issues. One problem though, the CoreAudio SDK was last updated in 2005! But, the answer to that one was to install Xcode. I did that and like a little bit of magic, it worked.

System Preferences - Sound

So now I should be back in business, with the Behringer FCA202 showing up and selectable as an audio input/output device.

I wanted to blame Behringer for this weirdness, but honestly, it was something weird with my own Mac. I’m still not sure what it was, but I really should consider doing a clean install next time. My system has probably built up way too much cruft over the years.

Oh, and just a note… I’m not convinced this is the end of the issue. I left the Mac up and running last night, and this morning the Behringer disappeared again. But I’ve read that is can happen, and a quick unplug/replug of the unit fixes it. So… as long as that doesn’t happen while I’m recording, I may be ok. (This problem I’m more tempted to blame on Behringer…)