Author: Christopher Breen

Adam Audio’s F5 Active Nearfield Monitor is the smallest member of the company’s F-Series family, which caters to the entry-level pro audio market. Advertised as near-field monitors and priced at $275 per speaker, two F5s make impressive companions on a largish desktop or mounted on a nearby wall.

The physical details

Each black F5 sports Adam’s X-ART tweeter and a 5-inch, glass-fibre/paper woofer. Separate 25-Watt amplifiers power each driver. Unlike traditional “computer” speakers, the F5 is not shielded, though in a day when CRT monitors are extremely rare, this is unlikely to be an issue. The power supply is switchable between 115 and 220 volts.

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498 days and 68 lessons later, it’s time to apply the decorative ribbon to Mac 101. It was fun while it lasted, but I’m done. As part of our journey we’ve started with the most basic of basics; taken long looks at the Finder; dived into the Mac’s Find features; explored Mail Contacts, Calendar, and Messages; gone on Safari; defined common jargon; previewed Preview; and even dipped our toes into iPhoto, iMovie, and GarageBand. In short, I’ve churned out enough material to create a goodly-sized book (he says, hinting broadly).

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Reader John Craven offers up this head-scratcher. He writes:

A short while ago I found a keyboard shortcut to reset Safari. Then recently I was having trouble with Safari and the keyboard shortcut stopped working along with a few other problems. I took my Mac to the Genius Bar and the technician showed me how to delete the plist file. This brought everything back to normal. The problem is I can’t remember the keyboard shortcut to reset Safari anymore.

If you remember, please let me know because I’ve never heard of such a shortcut. Oh sure, you can open Safari’s preferences (Command-comma), click the Advanced tab, enable the Show Develop Menu in Menu Bar option, and then press Command-Option-E to empty Safari’s caches, but that’s not the same thing as resetting the browser.

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Reader Steffie L is concerned not about what her iOS devices sees, but rather what it hears. She writes:

With more and more apps listening in at all times on your iOS device (Shazam, etc), short of deleting the app is there any way to control when this happens?

Under iOS 7, yes. One of the features introduced with this version of iOS was the ability to limit apps’ access to the device’s microphone. When you first launch an app that wants to use the mic, you’ll see a dialog box asking if you’re willing to let the app do this. Tap on OK and it now has the access it desires.

It’s a tradition that a true garage band must have at least one guitar (and more if you can rustle up enough outlets, amps, and kids who can nail a bar chord three out of five tries). Given that, it would be ridiculous if Apple’s GarageBand didn’t have some fairly hefty support for guitar and bass players. And it does, particularly if you drop the $5 in-app purchase price to gain all of GarageBand’s content.

Getting connected

Before you can strum, pick, bar, shred, tap, or whammy your way to wonderfulness you must find a way to jack your guitar into your Mac. At the most basic level it can be done for about $7 with a 1/4-inch-to-1/8-inch mono audio cable. The 1/4-inch connector plugs into your guitar and the 1/8-inch connector goes into the Mac’s audio input port. If you choose such a cable, make it as light as possible. If you add an adapter to a standard guitar cable its weight may put undue strain on your Mac’s audio port.

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Reader Delores Rice will soon be digging deeper into her Applications folder. She writes:

I need a program that will allow me to import a group of photos—maybe four to a page—type captions for each, and then print. Seems simple but I haven’t been able to use my existing programs. Can you advise on this?

There’s a good chance that you already have a copy of the application you seek: iPhoto ’11. Like so.

Import your images into iPhoto. Select the first one you wish to add a caption to and press Command-I. This produces the Info pane on the right side of the iPhoto window. Click where it reads Add a description… and do exactly as it asks—enter your caption. Repeat this process for each image you want to eventually print.

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In a recent Mac 911 entry I explained how to turn two hard drive partitions into one. And while words are great, sometimes it’s more helpful to see something like this in action. And so was this week’s Macworld video conceived.

Note that in the video I state that you can’t partition the drive you’ve booted from. This is incorrect. You can create an additional partition from the free space the drive holds. It’s not cogent to this particular exercise but I regret the error.

Transcript

I have a smallish hard drive here that I’ll split into two partitions. To do that I select the drive, click on the Partition tab, and choose 2 Partitions from the Partition Layout pop-up menu. To make sure I’ll be able to reclaim one of the partitions later I click on the Options button and ensure that either GUID or Apple Partition Map is selected and click OK. (I always choose GUID partition table as that’s the format that works with today’s Intel-based Macs.)

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In the past few weeks we’ve covered features of GarageBand that are helpful to nonmusicians—GarageBand’s interface, creating ringtones, and creating grooves using the application’s loops. In this lesson I’d like to address those people who, at one time in their life, were plunked down in front of a piano keyboard and forced to play “Bone Sweet Bone.”

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Reader Andrew Locke has no lack of bad luck with unwanted Web content to look at. He’d like to lock out some of it. He writes:

Over the years I’ve found that webpages get more junked up with pop-up ads, pop-over windows, and redirects to pages I don’t want to see. Is there some way to keep this stuff from happening?

As someone who makes a goodly portion of his living from Web-based advertising, I’ll put in a plug for sites that do this kind of thing: Ads and your clicks are what keep many of these companies in business. In lieu of visits from nattily attired executives rattling a tin cup and shouting “Give us money if you want to look at our pages!” ads become the de facto price for viewing online content.

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Reader Steven Solerno is a musician with mics in mind. He writes:

I’m glad you’re looking at GarageBand in Mac 101 because I’m hoping you can answer a question that’s been bugging me for awhile. In GarageBand I want to record a duet with my partner using two USB microphones but I can’t figure out how to do it. Is it possible?

It is, but the initial configuration happens outside of GarageBand. It works this way.

Plug both USB microphones into your Mac, venture to the Utilities folder (/Applications/Utilities) and launch Audio MIDI Setup. In the bottom left corner of the resulting window click the plus (+) button and choose Create Aggregate Device from the menu that appears.

In last week’s Let’s Create a Ringtone lesson, I attempted to show you that even musical novices can get value from GarageBand. And many of you grudgingly gave it a go. This week we’re going to create a rockin’ little multi-instrument groove. And yes, if you can click and drag, this is also well within your grasp.

That’s because GarageBand includes a collection of loops—audio blocks that you can piece together to form musical phrases. The particular magic of this operation is that you needn’t worry about the speed of your song or creating something where chords and notes are going to horribly clash. GarageBand was engineered so that these loops fit seamlessly together. Let’s give it a go.

Creating your loop project

For this exercise we’ll be using GarageBand along with the content you get with its $5 in-app purchase. If you haven’t yet pungled up for the extra content (and really, you should), follow along using the default collection of loops.

Launch GarageBand. From its Projects chooser click on Empty Project and click Choose. When the main window opens and you’re offered the choice to add a particular kind of track (Software Instrument, Audio, Guitar, or Drummer), click on Drummer and then click Create. You now have a project that contains a single track called SoCal. There are two instances of the drum pattern here, with the second beginning where it reads ‘9’ in the ruler. Click on the second one and then press the Mac’s Delete key so that you have just the one instance.

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Reader Sonya Jefferson tells a tale of two partitions. She writes:

I used Disk Utility to format a drive so that it has two partitions. I’d now like to combine those partitions into a single one. How do I do that?

Launch Disk Utility, select the drive that holds these partitions (rather than one of the partitions) and run your eyes over the diagram to the right, noting the name of the partition that appears on the bottom of the layout.

Move to the Finder and open that bottom partition. If it has regular old files on it, copy them to the first partition (if they fit). If they don’t, find another drive or volume that will hold them (if only temporarily). If the bottom partition is bootable and the top one isn’t, clone it to the first one using a tool such as Bombich Software’s $40 Carbon Copy Cloner.

Reader Liam Yates finds himself with two spare hard drives and one question. He writes:

Over the years I’ve collected a couple of USB external hard drives that I’m not using. I wondered if I could combine them in some way so I could use them as a single volume with my Mac.

Could you? Probably. Should you? Nah.

Addressing the Could side of the equation, yes, under ideal circumstances you could launch Disk Utility (found in /Applications/Utilities), click on the RAID tab, drag the two drives into the drive area, choose one of three formatting flavors—Mirrored RAID Set, Striped RAID Set, or Concatenated Disk Set—and click Create. The drives would be erased and the formatting applied.

When introducing you to GarageBand in our last lesson, I claimed that nonmusicians could find uses for Apple’s audio and music application. I can hardly blame some of you for responding with a hearty “Prove it, buddy.” And so I shall, by outlining how to craft a ringtone from one of your favorite tunes.

Choosing a track

Launch GarageBand. In the Project chooser select Ringtone and click the Choose button. The main GarageBand window will open. Inside you’ll find a single track called Audio 1. The Cycle button will be engaged, and the ruler will bear a yellow bar that stretches for 20 measures. (That yellow color denotes the length of the cycled section.) To the right, the Loops pane appears by default.

In the display (which currently shows bars, beats, divisions, and ticks), click the Note/Metronome icon and choose Time from the pop-up menu. Then drag on the right side of the yellow cycle bar so that it ends at 0:40. You do this because you can make ringtones no longer than 40 seconds; creating a cycle bar of that length shows you how much audio you have to work with.

Reader Chris Sinclair would love to have a copy of his old email. He writes.

My company has used Gmail for a few years and recently switched to Office 365. The IT department said that it would be removing my old Gmail but I wasn’t worried about it because I had a copy of that mail in Outlook (which is the email client I use). I launched Outlook the other day and started searching for an old message. I found it but suddenly it and almost all of my old email disappeared before my eyes. Can I get it back? What’s going on?

Having gone through a similar experience I can tell you exactly what happened. You had a Gmail IMAP account, which feeds messages from a central server. The relationship between your computer and this server is such that when messages are deleted from one, they also disappear from the other unless you’ve taken specific steps to back them up.

Some time before you last launched Outlook, the folks in charge of transitioning your email from Gmail to Microsoft deleted your old Gmail messages. When you launched Outlook it showed you a list of the email messages it currently held. However, it then synced with the server, found that a load of those messages had been deleted, and then set about to do the same thing with the locally stored copies. So, they were there one second and gone the next.

The important question is what you can do about it. The first is to pray that the IT department archived those messages and can provide you with access to them. Ask nicely, please.

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Wait!! Yes, you—you who absent-mindedly clicked the link that led you here; realized that you were about to receive instruction regarding Apple’s affordable audio/music application; thought “Heck, I’m no musician, I think I’ll read about user permissions instead”; and now have your finger poised over the mouse button, trackpad clicker, or iOS screen that will whisk you elsewhere. You needn’t be a musician—trained or otherwise—to get some use out of GarageBand. In fact, the application was designed with nonmusicians (or the minimally musical) in mind. And best of all, no talent is required. So stick around, at least for the next couple of paragraphs, so you can learn what GarageBand can do for you.

With GarageBand you don’t have to be able to play a lick to create musical scores for your movies. If you can place blocks end to end, you can use GarageBand’s loops to create a compelling score. You can also create your own ringtones from your favorite songs. You can edit any compatible audio file—not just music files but recordings you’ve made with your iOS device (of class lectures or business meetings, for example). And if you’d like to try your hand at playing guitar or piano, GarageBand includes introductory lessons for doing just that.

And if you’re a musician, GarageBand offers much more. It can serve as a musical sketchpad for writing tunes. You can use its built-in stomp box effects and amps to wail away on your guitar at 3 a.m. without waking your neighbors. The application’s Drummer feature helps make your tracks sound more lifelike. And its software instruments offer you the kind of synthesizer palette that once cost thousands of dollars to replicate.

Let’s begin our look with a stroll through the interface.

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