Archive for June 2009
Mac and Me, It’s Over
The iMac has died.
I was out of town for a couple days in late May, for which I turned off power to the computers while I was away. Upon my return, and when I turned power back on to the iMac, all I got was a folder icon, with a question mark. A quick call to Applecare followed, and with their help we determined that the internal hard drive had died. As I have previously written about, all that was on the iMac was my music and sound collection, and I was doing a daily backup to two external hard drives, so I haven’t lost anything.
Any sane person simply cannot be without music in their lives, so I purchased a Dell PC at my local Costco. I have previously owned a Dell, and this one is a nice rig. But there is still that nagging hesitation concerning the crappy, heavy accented tech support, and all the bloat that they add to their machines. This Dell rig has Windows Vista 64 bit Home Premium, with a 24-inch monitor.
Right off the top, within a couple hours of new, one of the cooling fans on the Dell kicked into high gear and tried to imitate a helicopter. Dell tech support was pretty unresponsive, as expected. A couple days later, FedEx delivered a box with two new fans and a new power supply. No note in the box, and still no email. There have been a couple phone messages, in which some guy mumbles something about Dell and what I think is his cell phone number, so I think the two might be related. Still no email, or easily understood phone call, so the new stuff sits on the floor, awaiting an uncertain fate. By the way, a review of the forums suggests that the random high speed cooling fan problem is common to several different Dell motherboards and firmware versions, and is easily fixed by a power-off/power-on cycle; so far, only twice in the one month of ownership, and only after the occasional warm boot. [Update: The high speed fan problem continues to come up after the occasional warm reboot, but a cold boot takes care of this annoyance. As for the new stuff in the box that Dell sent. It all made for some good paper weights because I refuse to use the same crap that failed brand-new in the first place. I didn't ask for it and I won't use it, even if it was free.]
Why another PC instead of simply fixing the iMac?
Simple answer: I like to tweak, and I have a pretty good idea of what I’m doing when I do it. I really, really don’t like it that with the iMac I cannot simply open the case, unplug the hard drive and plug in a new one. Ten minutes to a fix, tops. I have always felt that the iMac ran a bit hot, with nothing more that vents on the bottom, and a long slot across the top, and no cooling fan. My own gut feeling is that since I never turned it off, and seldom rebooted, the poor hard drive simply cooked itself, and it died when it cooled down from the power being off.
Next task was how to get the music files from one of the Mac-formatted backups to the new Dell PC. The externals were hooked to the iMac by way of a couple Firewire 400 connections, which the Dell also has. A quick on-line search found MacDrive, a PC program that allows a PC to read a Mac-formatted drive. And it works great. I copied all the music files to the PC without a hitch.
Before loading iTunes, I took the opportunity to reorganize the Music folder to get them off and away from the iTunes folder. The scheme I now use is C:/Users/[me]/Music/Library. I lost about 30 bits of album art that I had previously let iTunes get for me, but I either found them elsewhere on the ‘net, or rescanned them myself with Photoshop. To keep Apple’s “helpful” fingers out of my stuff, especially that silly “Compilations” folder, when I loaded iTunes I unchecked the “Keep iTunes music folder organized”. I have also decided that I’ll keep the WAV and other source files separate and away from the iTunes library, using only MP3s for that purpose, which allows adding album art to the file itself.
For an editor, I reloaded CoolEdit, but Vista is a bit too fast for that nine-year-old program. So I tried the open source Audacity, the NCH suite (way too intrusive), and the nice Free Audio Editor, which looks a lot like Office 2007. Development of FAE has continued and a paid version is now available, with some addons that make the program a worthwhile buy. I really liked CoolEdit 2000, so after some consideration, and a trial period, I purchased Adobe Audition 3, which retains all the features of the old CoolEdit, plus some other bits. I especially like the ability to record a vinyl album as a single file, then use Audition’s marker labels to split and save the different tracks into separate files.
As expected, due to the changes in Vista versus XP and the way each handles sound, Total Recorder doesn’t play nice with the integrated sound on the Dell, so I installed a Soundblaster X-Fi Extreme Audio sound card.
After numerous tries, Total Recorder still would not work as easily as I would prefer (too many senior moments in which I forget how I got it to work in the first place). Finally after reading numerous postings to various tech support groups, I decided to use the no-cost method of a miniplug patch cord between the speaker output on the Sound Blaster card, looping back to the motherboard’s integrated microphone input plug.
The patch-cord fix works great, especially with the open source Audicity sound editing software. To use either Audition ($$$) or Audicity (free), I have to disable the Bose Companion speakers since their USB connection seems to confuse all other sound programs. I then enable a set of speakers connected to the Soundblaster sound card, and it all works as needed. I use a Y-adapter cord that allows use of the single speaker output to both the speakers and the patch cord for the input plug. As I said, it works great, all for the cost of a $6 patch cord.
When I’m done being creative, I disable the standard speakers, and enable the Bose speakers. (One small quirk: whatever sound application is running remembers which speakers are being used, no matter if they are disabled or enabled. So to change speakers, I need to shut the application down and restart it.)
For backups there are two external hard drives: a set of two Other World Computing (OWC MacSales, Inc.) 500GB Mercury Elite-AL Pro “Quad Interface” drives that allow any of the current connections (USB, FW400, FW800, eSATA) between the externals and the Dell PC. Although preformatted as Mac, they work just fine on a PC after being reformatted.
To use the two eSATA connections for the external hard drives, I bought an SATA extension add-on that has two external eSATA ports connected direct to two empty SATA ports on the motherboard. Now, with USB 3 on the horizon, this whole eSATA and SATA thing for external drives may soon become a non-issue.
As for fixing the iMac, since it was still on the original 3-year Applecare warranty, I let them replace the hard drive free of charge. I have since passed it on to a family member who really, really needed the tunes to help him get through his day.
