Rotophonic

A geeky blog discussing the world of music, technology & politics.

Archive for category Apple

Hidden Leopard Gems: Directory

Oct 26

Posted by rotophonic in Apple, Hidden Leopard Gems, Technology | 5 Comments

DirectoryPop open the Utilities folder and you’ll find Address Book’s new kid brother, an Apple application called Directory that was slipped into Leopard.

When you’re running your computer on a network that has an Apple OS X server, this little app automatically pulls up a list of all the Users and Groups in the Open Directory tree. It’s the new front end for shared contacts and resources on the network. Why this wasn’t simply integrated into Address Book is puzzling.

Here’s Apple’s description of its functions (most of which sound suspiciously things that Address Book should be doing):

Users whose computers have Mac OS X v10.5 and are bound to a Mac OS X server can use Directory to view shared information about people, groups, locations, and resources. They can use Directory to share contacts, set up group services, and manage their own contact information in a server’s directory.

Seems like Apple might have had competing product teams working on Directory and Address Book and as usual the business-focused product looks unfinished.

Directory is a basic front-end to Open Directory: of two preferences available in the application one is whether you want to display a person’s name as First Last, Last First or Last, First; and the other is what type of authentication you want to use.

Perhaps Directory will grow up into a beautiful swan of an application and replace the tired Address Book. It does have a nice Kinko’s meets Facebook icon and that’s a good start.

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Hidden Leopard Gems: Mail Progress Display

Oct 26

Posted by rotophonic in Apple, Hidden Leopard Gems | 2 Comments

Mail ProgressHave you ever stared at Apple’s Mail program and wondered whether your email was actually sending or stuck in the outbox? Or wondered if the downloading of a huge attachment was causing your incoming mail just slowing to a crawl?

Arriving about three years late, with the Leopard 10.5 release Apple has finally included an always-visible progress bar in it’s Mail program. It’s time to say good riddance to the stupid Activity Viewer window (and its stop sign-shaped cancel buttons) that would always seem to be hidden when you wanted to see what was happening with your mail.

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Universal to Launch “Total Music” Buffet-Style

Oct 12

Posted by rotophonic in Apple, Music Business, Technology | No Comments

Total Music Buffet

What’s better than a buffet? Free Buffet. In the quest to devalue its music, Universal Music is pitching a new service to music player manufacturers: a “Total Music” player would come with all-you-can-eat music.

As Big Music swirls down the crapper, Universal is trying to throw out a lifeline with another new digital music distribution product: A product that simultaneously changes the way people interact with their music and changes the ownership model for music. Big Music has been trying this for years, but I’m sure this new pitch is GOLD.

According to an article in Business Week, Doug Morris, head of Universal Music, wants consumers to think of music like a utility (like water and gas). I think this idea is more like a buffet.

Like your meal at a buffet, one buys admission by purchasing a “Total Music” player and then “never shells out a penny for the music. ‘You know that it’s there, and it costs something,’ says one tech company executive who has seen Morris’ presentation. ‘But you never write a check for it.’ ” Talk about reducing the value of your music.

What does Steve Jobs think of Morris? I can’t help but hear a backhanded slap in this quote he gave Business Week, “He’s the last of the great music executives who came up through A&R. He’s old school.”

I’m not really a buffet-type. I prefer the hotel’s 24-hour sit down restaurant or Spago when I’m in Vegas. I avoid the buffet because a buffet, even a Vegas buffet, draws you in with a few high cost items and fills the rest of the serving line with awful stuff. I’d rather eat well and eat what I want.

Music Industry Launches Four-Pronged Effort to Destroy Itself

Oct 10

Posted by rotophonic in Apple, Dance Music, Music Business | 19 Comments

Big Fork
Like a snake eating its tail, the Mega Music Industry has launched its four-pronged strategy to destroy itself:

  • destroy the goodwill of music fans by entrapping the children, the poor and the technically illiterate then suing them;
  • continue to release music that no one would be caught dead sharing;
  • turn their back on profitable, legal sales by backing out of deals with legal music sales entities, like Apple’s iTunes music store;
  • finally, gut fair-use by pursuing those true thieves–their own customers–who burn mix CDs or rip their own music for their iPods.

In the circle of life the big labels are headed back to dust.

Destroy the goodwill of music fans
The music industry has always been populated with greedy bastards. It’s a fairly common story to hear of the band signing a deal with a big record label and then being forced into using that label’s own producers, studios, and marketers, only to have their earnings from music sales eaten up by exorbitant charges: charges that were paid right back to the label itself.

Now, in the name of the artists, the RIAA, with evidence gained from its hacker team, is suing individuals under the weakest rationales. The RIAA is now celebrating its first win in the courts. This is clearly going to bring tons of goodwill to the industry and its artists. Brilliant.

Release Unsharable Music
Given that the radio industry has become a wholly-owned subsidiary of the music industry, the labels can continue to release trash music with an extremely short half-life and be assured that it will get tons of airplay. This isn’t music people want to buy. It’s like a pop version of Muzak. This music will embarrass any potential file sharer. If you become the butt of jokes because you’re sharing the latest Britney Spears album, you’ll be a lot less likely to share music. Again, brilliant.

Turn its back on iTunes
While the music labels whined about Napster and pursued pathetic attempts to market digital music via repressive DRM and subscriptions, Steve Jobs and Apple single-handedly saved the retail music industry by opening the iTunes Store and giving the public a reasonable way to purchase music online. For that, many labels in the music industry are now crying foul and threatening not to renew their deals with Apple or going month-to-month on their deals.

I think they’re right. They own the music. And if they don’t want to sell any, they should back out of those deals. This will be a very effective prong of their strategy.

Start suing their own customers
In the most depraved prong of their strategy, the labels now appear poised to begin criminalizing the fair use of music. Always bitter that the software industry had a better model for selling their product than they did (licensing per device), the music industry is now hinting that they will begin pursuing their own customers for ripping music onto an iPod or burning it on a CD. By doing this, the industry reduce even further the value of its music to its customers. This is likely the final nail in the coffin for Big Music.

With this four-pronged strategy, I believe Big Music has sealed their fate.

I’m not a serial music sharer, just a long-time customer of Big Music. I purchased and own thousands of CDs. I feel like I did my part to support good music being released by the big labels. At this point, though, I will never purchase another track from the big labels. I’ll buy from Radiohead. I’ll buy from independent artists on iTunes. And I’ll continue to buy from Beatport. Those folks get it. The “Industry” doesn’t.

[photo by Erica Marshall]

Steve Jobs! Where’s Final Cut Server?

Sep 21

Posted by rotophonic in Apple, Technology, Television, Video Editing | 1 Comment

Final Cut ServerA lot has happened in the video editing world. Avid is scared shitless. And tons of things have changed since I begged Apple to get serious about workflow applications. Despite that, Apple has still not released Final Cut Server.

At NAB they promised to release the software “this summer”, but, while I’m no calendar expert, I believe we’re at summer’s end. What’s the story? Apple hasn’t made one change to their promotional page for Final Cut Server since NAB. It’s difficult to believe that this is a positive development for Apple’s “Avid Killer”.

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Six Things You Didn’t Know About Apple Final Cut Studio 2

Apr 16

Posted by rotophonic in Apple, Technology | 2 Comments

Final Cut Studio 2As predicted, Apple released Final Cut Studio 2 on Sunday, April 15th and while many others have covered the major features, I thought I’d share a few hidden gems gleaned from pouring over the documentation and demo videos.

Final Cut Studio No Longer Runs with Built-In Intel Graphics
Sorry, MacBook and Intel Mac Mini users. Apple has apparently removed support for your graphics cards. While the Intel graphics chips supported Quartz Extreme (albeit much more slowly) and Final Cut Studio v1 works just fine on my Intel Mac Mini, I think Apple would prefer that its “Pro” users use their higher-end computers, even if budgets sometimes don’t allow it.

Includes a Wicked New Feature: Match Moving and Tracking
In the past “blurring” of unreleased faces consumed a huge amount of any non-fiction film/television project’s post-production budget because the face tracking had to be done manually. As some may know, any television or film production requires a signed legal release for any person or product that appears in the footage and those without releases get blurred.

Now with Motion, just add a blur over your clip and attach it to a tracking target on your footage (the middle of the person’s face, for example) and render. While this is not new technology to most who have used Shake or other motion tracking tools, it is the first time such technology will be available on such a wide scale and at such an affordable price.

I’m guessing that they bought the technology from The Pixel Farm given the conspicuous promotion of The Pixel Farm on the Motion 3 product page with no mention of Final Cut Studio on The Pixel Farm’s web site.

Makes 5.1 Surround Easy
Besides being able to work with a 5.1 audio track as a single unit in the timeline in Soundtrack, you can apply 5.1-aware audio effects like reverb directly to your production audio. Simply convert your stereo audio to a 5.1 surround track (one click) and then apply the Space Designer plug-in to generate true surround, including sound cross reflection. Soundtrack even comes with 1000 royalty-free music beds and sound effects (like the sound of an airport) that you can drop onto clip.

Adds Simple AutoCluster in Compressor 3
Two things: Compressor hasn’t exactly been a speedster in rendering exports in the past and distributing the rendering out to other computers on your network wasn’t exactly easy or trouble-free. With Compressor 3, you can now quickly set up computers on your network to share rendering responsibility.

Runner up feature in Compressor: Retiming. Want your 31.2 second commercial to fit in your 30 second slot? Compressor will handle retiming using technology from Shake that analyzes the frames and assures smooth clean motion. Compressor even handles adjusting the audio for you.

Includes Adaptive Cadence Removal in Compressor
As someone who is working with a lot of 24PA footage, Final Cut Pro 5 is sometimes a temperamental beast when it comes to removing the “Advanced Pulldown” during capture. With the 24PA DVCPROHD footage we’ve been shooting, a 2:3:3:2 pulldown is added to the video and those extra video fields are supposed to be removed during capture. But sometimes if your in-point falls in the middle of the pulldown cadence, Final Cut doesn’t notice, requiring you to watch the capture window like a hawk and sometimes retry capturing multiple times.

Compressor will now analyze and discover pulldown cadence and remove it automatically. Haven’t seen this work yet, obviously, but if it does it’s going to be sweet.

Final Cut Studio’s new Color application used to cost between $5,000-$25,000 from Silicon Color
When Apple announced that Color would be included in the Final Cut Studio 2 box for the same price as the previous Final Cut Studio, audience members gasped and then cheered. This former Silicon Color tool’s inclusion in the Final Cut Studio package really puts the pressure on Avid. I mean, it costs $5000 just for Avid’s standalone editing product, Media Composer. And now for $1,299 you can get everything. Amazing.

[image credit: Apple Inc.]