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Obtaining free GarageBand sounds

I like nearly all of Apple’s $99 Jam Pack add-on sound libraries for GarageBand (Voices doesn’t do a lot for me), but I also like free. And when I think free and GarageBand I think SoundFonts, E-mu Systems’ sampled sound file format—a software instrument format supported by GarageBand.

Here’s how to obtain and install SoundFonts:

1. Google “soundfont” to find one of the many sites that offer free SoundFonts—HammerSound is a good place to start.

Record any sounds

Many fleeting sounds that play on your Mac are worth preserving. Content streaming over the Internet-be it Internet radio, online videos, or an iChat phone call-or even the audio coming from a concert DVD you’re watching can have lasting value, but such content is not always easy to capture. Maybe you’re making a podcast and would like to include a Skype interview (recorded with permission, of course), or you want to take content from your favorite streaming radio station with you on your iPod. With the help of the right software, you can record and edit audio files and add them to iTunes for future use.

Capture Bits and Bytes

First, you’ll need software to record audio. There are two excellent Mac programs that can do this: Rogue Amoeba Software’s $32 Audio Hijack Pro 2.8.1, and Ambrosia Software’s $69 WireTap Studio 1.0.6 (version 1.0.1, ). Both allow you to capture audio coming from any program-while excluding sound from other applications or the system-and save it in the format you want. WireTap Studio costs twice as much as Audio Hijack Pro, but it comes with powerful audio editing tools; Audio Hijack Pro requires a separate editing tool, such as Rogue Amoeba Software’s Fission (discussed later).

When recording any online audio, you should consider copyright restrictions. While recording and saving audio such as that from radio programs may be legal according to the U.S. Copyright act’s “fair use” doctrine, you may not have the right to save-and especially to share with others-certain recordings, such as a single from a band’s Web site, for example.

Watching the Olympics on your Mac

As you may have heard, there’s a smallish sporting event going on in China. Despite its humbleness, people seem to be interested in the thing. Some of them use Macs. And some of those Mac users are more that a little peeved that NBC seems unwilling to provide Olympics videos that are compatible with their computers. Such sentiment is nicely distilled by reader Chuck, who writes:

Am I correct is observing that Olympics-related downloads at NBC.com are PC-only? If so, are they nuts?

While I can’t speak directly to NBC’s sanity, given its extended pout over providing content to the iTunes Store, I think we can safely say that while not insane, the people in charge of Internet content certainly bear watching. But questions of corporate lunacy aside, there’s this:

Yes, when you attempt to download videos from NBC’s site, you’ll see this message:

Imagining a new iTunes

I’d like to take the next couple of minutes to reach out across this vast expanse between us and solicit your help. It’s like this:

Earlier this week I penned Don’t Be a Player Hater, a reply to PC World’s 11 Things We Hate About iTunes. The reaction to both articles in our forums was interesting. Mixed in among the predictable Windows taunts there were a couple of comments along the lines of “Many of the PC World gripes were admittedly picayune, but perhaps it is time to take a look at redoing iTunes.”

And I believe there’s some truth in this. iTunes started out as the big brother to Casady & Green’s SoundJam MP—a basic audio player that could rip your CDs. iTunes today does this as well as catalogs your music, videos, podcasts, and iPhone applications; plays all these media types (save applications); creates playlists; streams Internet radio; burns CDs and DVDs; pops up a visualizer you can space out to; synchronizes music and data to iPods, iPhones, and Apple TVs; streams content to Apple TVs; converts media from one format to another; acts as a front-end for the iTunes Store; manages movie rentals; and edits ringtones.

Don’t be a player hater

Like the rest of us, our friends a few cubicles down at PC World get fed up to the point where the dam of their frustration eventually bursts. Such was the case when PC World posted its 11 Things We Hate About iTunes, along with an equally ire-filled companion piece Is Apple iTunes the new AOL? (Our short answer: No. No, it isn’t. Our longer answer: The new AOL? Really?)

PC World, we feel your pain. We at Macworld have been dealing with Apple issues since the dinosaurs walked the earth and have learned to deal with things with a measure of patience and understanding. With that in mind, allow me to attempt to take some of the sting out of those 11 hateful things.

1. Wildly Inefficient Updates

What PC World Hates: “Forcing us to download and reinstall the entire program for every little update. And bundling QuickTime, too, whether it’s new or not.”

Driving iTunes Daffy

Three recent events have put me in the Apple-suggesting mood.

The first is that on Monday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in New York said that it’s perfectly okay with it if consumers stored recorded television programming on remote servers rather than on a hard drive packed inside their home digital video recorder. Think TiVo. Think storage in the cloud rather than on that TiVo’s hard drive. Think expandable storage. Think Video-on-Demand by another name. Think how much the cable companies love the idea and how thoroughly the networks loath it. You’ve got the idea.

The second is last night’s encounter with my Apple TV. It’s 20 minutes before dinner, my daughter had been good as gold all day, and she sweetly asks “Dada, could we watch a new Daffy Duck?”

iTunes' Start and Stop Times

A reader recently wrote in with a problem he was having with a rebuilt iTunes library. The gist is that although all the music played, several of the songs ended before they were supposed to and then the next tune in the playlist began playing immediately afterwards.

I suggested that he select one of these tunes, press Command-I to bring up the Info window, click the Options tab, and make sure that the Stop Time option was unchecked. Sure enough, it was checked for each of the songs he’d had difficulties with. Unchecking the option did the trick.

In his reply he wrote “Never knew what that was. I turned it off, and problem solved.” This leads me to believe that those people who take advantage of the Start and Stop time options are few and far between. And why not? What possible good could these settings do?

iPod touch and the flaky, flaky crust

Not long ago I used this space to offer instructions for downgrading an iPod touch’s software from 2.0 to 1.1.4. That bit of prose was met largely with a “Huh? Why on earth would you want to do that!?” reaction.

If “just for the hell of it” doesn’t serve, try this on for size:

Because the iPhone and iPod touch 2.0 software can be as flaky as my Aunt Vilma’s crescent rolls.

This, that, and the iTunes Store

Random thoughts on recent iTunes Store happenings:

Hey, more rentals. It’s taken awhile, but Apple has been filling out its rental inventory to the point where you can browse the aisles without muttering “Seen it, seen it, dreadful, seen it, they have the awful remake but not the original, seen it….” Using iTunes’ Search feature it appears that you can currently rent 1,462 movies. Closed-captioned movies are still the ugly step-child, however. iTunes offers only 94 of them.

Price matters I can’t swear that Apple pays attention to user reviews, but I do think it’s striking that after users slammed the recent release of the X-Files seasons for being too expensive at $45 for a season (more than the DVD sets on Amazon) the price just dropped to $25 per season.

Checking on iTunes' unchecked items

I figured this was part of everyone’s DNA by now, but, given a message I just received, apparently not. A reader who shall remain nameless wrote:

Is there any way to modify iTunes so that the program begins with no songs checked each time it is booted? Beyond the initial boot, I would like iTunes to behave exactly as it does; this is a feature I would prefer to have only when I click on the iTunes program.

And the answer is, of course, “Of course.” Just hold down the Command key and click on the checkbox of a checked track. All tracks in that playlist (and this includes such major entries as Music, TV Shows, Audiobooks, and Ringtones) will be unchecked. When you quit iTunes, it remembers its checked-item state and so, when you next launch it, all unchecked items will remain so.

And—again, of course—when you Command-click on an unchecked box, all items in that list become checked.