Category: Reviews-HowTos

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.

The most recent versions of Adobe Reader install a new security feature. When in place, any attempt to open a PDF file within Safari is initially blocked. In order to get the PDF to open, you have to negotiate two warning messages.

Call me reckless, but I am not especially concerned about the security risk here. I would much rather avoid the hassle of having to deal with the warnings each and every time I attempt to load a PDF. So, I set about to disable the feature. Figuring out how to do so turned out to be more work than I had anticipated.

Much has been written about the Wi-Fi capability of new cameras. But how do you integrate these features into a useful workflow?

In part, the answer depends on the abilities of both the camera and its companion app. I’ve tested a number of cameras for this purpose and have settled on two that I use for my work: the Canon 70D and the Olympus OM-D E-M1. (Panasonic, Sony, Samsung, and others are also doing a great job in this area.)

As a real-world example, here is the workflow that I used to cover the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this year. With these tools, I was able to use remote-control capture, transfer pictures to mobile devices, sort images, apply filters, and publish to online sites.

Setup and tools

Using the iPhone 5s and the iPad mini with Retina display, I published photos daily from the Las Vegas Convention Center, while my MacBook Pro was locked in the hotel room safe. Before leaving for my assignment, I downloaded and tested the EOS Remote and the Olympus Image Share iOS apps on both devices.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Used to be, people  maintained literal personal phonebooks. Books into which they scrawled the names, numbers, and addresses of their friends and family members. Those were dark times.

In 2014, there’s no need for such old-fashioned foofaraw. Your Mac and iOS devices can sync all your contacts for you, and store more data than those books of yore could have handled even if you wrote with the sharpest of number two pencils. There are plenty of ways to deal with your contacts’ information, so which method do you choose?

I spoke with Apple experts Glenn Fleishman, John Moltz, Jaimee Newberry, David Sparks, and Marco Tabini about how they organize their contacts. The upshot: No one’s thrilled with how they organize that Rolodexical data, but there are numerous approaches that work “well enough.”

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.

You may use your Mac for serious work, but sometimes it’s a good thing to add a touch of whimsy to it. Here are four quick tips for customizing OS X and making it a bit more fun to use.

1. Try the iTunes Artwork screensaver

When you’re not working, by default your Mac’s screen turns black with a subtle, shifting white Apple icon and a bit of text, usually your username. But you need not settle for that. To pick something different, go to Apple menu > System Preferences, select Desktop & Screen Saver, and then click the Screen Saver tab. You’ll find a lot of fun options to explore here, such as “Word of the Day.” If you’re a music fan, though, try the iTunes Artwork screensaver, which displays a collage of random album covers from your iTunes library.

Scroll down the list of options in the left-hand column. When you see iTunes Artwork, click to select it, and then click Screen Saver Options. Here you’ll see the option to choose the number of album-cover rows as well as the “delay” in seconds. By default the delay is set to 2 seconds, meaning that every 2 seconds one of the album covers will flip to expose a new cover.

Click the Preview section of the preference pane to see the screensaver in action. You’ll notice that the different albums change at random, one at a time. As a bonus, if you spot an album you want to play, you can hover your cursor over its artwork and click to start the music.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Angry Birds Go starts off strong with a familiar character, a basic go kart, and a fun course with polished visuals. Despite the solid start to this racing game, this is one of those free-to-play games that quickly gets bogged down by in-game purchases. 

The different racetracks are fun, particularly the ones that involve great leaps and flying, and various types of races are included to spice up the the game. One involves collecting a certain amount of fruit by driving into them, while another requires you to quickly maneuver around ice, rock and wood obstacles before the timer runs out and a bomb explodes. 

Unfortunately, purchases and sponsored ads are constantly dangled in front of you, interfering with your enjoyment of the game. This is a case where unless you make the in-game purchases, the the races quickly become tedious.

In order to unlock different tracks and characters, you must first pass all the levels of your current racing course. To successfully complete those levels, kart upgrades that cost gold coins are required. These coins must be collected from the track and earned by successfully completing challenges and then repeating races over and over again, unless you pay for them or the upgraded karts themselves.  

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

We seldom have complete control when shooting portraits, but we are masters of our images when we open them in Aperture for editing. In just five easy steps, you can transform a ho-hum snapshot into framable work of art.

Step 1: Crop to taste

Nearly every portrait benefits from cropping. By zooming in a bit tighter, we can bring out the subject’s personality.

Enable the cropping tool by clicking on its icon at the bottom of the screen, or by pressing the C key. A floating palette appears along with an adjustable grid. Click and drag on any of the eight handles of the grid to frame the image.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

In this first column of 2014, I address how to get a list of apps on an iOS device, show some tagging tricks for multidisc sets, and offer suggestions for iTunes controllers.

Q: Like many of us, I expect, I have a lot of apps in my iTunes library that I no longer need. I’d like to clean them out so I don’t waste time, disk space, and bandwidth updating them, and cut down on clutter and confusion. I have two iOS devices, and would like to know of a method to get a list of the apps on each, combine the lists, and toss out anything not on them. Do you have any suggestions for an easy way to do this?

You can see all the apps installed on a given iOS device in Settings > General > Usage, but I don’t think that’s what you want. I can think of two ways to get a list to determine which apps you can delete. The first is to back up your iOS devices; if you have them set to back up to iCloud, you need to do a backup to your Mac. Next choose Go > Go to Folder in the Finder and enter ~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup. In that folder you’ll see other folders with long alphanumeric names; there should be one for each of your iOS devices. Look for an info.plist file inside one of these folders.

Copy that file to your desktop and then open it with a text editor such as Apple’s TextEdit. Near the top of the file you’ll see something like this, showing the name of your device:

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here