audio posts

Arguments happen, words are thrown, and words are sometimes misconstrued. "Stop putting words in my mouth!", someone might say to you. With Tapparatus's iSaidWhat?! [iTunes link], now you can put words in someone else's mouth.

Well, sort of.

In addition to serving as a basic voice recorder, iSaidWhat?! also allows you to cut and rearrange audio snippets. Take the following interaction between Jerry and Dorothy:

Jerry: I love you. You complete me. If I had just...
Dorothy: Shut up. Just shut up. You had me at hello. You had me at hello.

Using iSaidWhat?!, you could break down recorded audio into blocks of words or into individual words. So, the above conversation can rearranged into the following:

Jerry: You love me. I complete you.
Dorothy: Shut up. Just shut up.

The app is very polished and a delight to use. Users are presented with two tabs, one a list of their recordings and the other a list of their arrangements. A snappy and intuitive interface allows you to mark in- and out-points; and after you've completed marking these points, you're asked what you'd like to name it.

After completing an audio compilation, you can share it with the world. The app allows you to share your creation via email (which it encodes as a .wav file), over the network, Facebook and Twitter. iSaidWhat?! is available for purchase at the iTunes store for USD $1.99.

When we first heard about the Kanex HDMI + digital audio converter a few weeks ago, I was eager to give it a trial run and see if it managed to deliver on the promise of integrated audio with HDMI video. I've been playing with the $70 unit for a few days now, and the answer is a qualified yes: it does the job, but depending on your home theater setup you may be able to get by with a less expensive option.

The digital-audio Kanex unit ships without a manual and is largely self-explanatory (although the company has now posted a basic user guide and FAQ) -- a female HDMI port on one side of the roughly iPod-sized unit, and three male cables coming out the other side. The cables connect to the mini DisplayPort, optical audio out, and USB port of your Mac; while Kanex does sell a $60 unit that handles audio over USB, this version only uses that connection to power the adapter and does not provide a USB audio interface. If you're running short of open powered USB ports you might opt to plug it into a USB power adapter instead.

In operation, there's not much to worry about: I plugged in all three ports to a unibody MacBook Pro and connected an HDMI display, then went to the normal Mac OS X Displays preference pane, where I found a full assortment of resolutions for my enjoyment. The top few 'television' options may vary with your connected gear; on my test set (a Vizio 42" 720p display) I was able to choose 720p and, oddly enough, 1080i and 1080p. Below that you have resolutions ranging from 640x480 up into the 1600x1000 range.

Smart playlists have been a feature of iTunes since version 3.0 (circa 2002), and they provide a means for you to create automatically-updated playlists that fit a certain criteria. For me, they serve as a hands-off way to stay up-to-date on my latest music and Podcasts, as well as a repository for a certain genre of music. To create a smart playlist, click on "File" and select "New Smart Playlist" (or you can use the command-option-n keyboard shortcut).

If you want a playlist that contains only holiday music, you could specify that the playlist include all songs with either the "Christmas" or "Chanukah" genre tag on it. Because smart playlists auto-update, you needn't worry about adding songs to it: as long as the track's tags meet the criteria, it is automatically included in the playlist -- unless, of course, you choose the "limit to" option, which limits the the tracks in the playlist based on your choosing.

Read more for five of my favorite smart playlists, as well as criteria for how to create them.

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When we published our "Ultimate Mac mini Home Theater" guide in August, I drooled along with everyone else at the idea of supercharging my HDTV with a mini for movie and music playback. Something nagged at me, though, as I looked over the options for going from the mini's video-out ports (the current model sports both DVI and Display Port) to the HDMI standard connector that most TVs expect nowadays... how to get that digital audio signal onto the HDMI link, and avoid a second set of cables to handle sound? It seemed less than graceful.

If you want to skip over a clunky external converter box like this one, current minis and other Macs featuring the Mini Display Port connector now have a new option for HDMI; Kanex's two audio-included connectors can put the sound onto the HDMI link where it belongs.

Kanex is selling two models of the connector (both are on extremely limited availability right now, the company says). The $60 Digital Audio version includes a TOSLINK optical connector for premium quality sound, and the USB Audio version delivers analog audio for $50 [as of 10/20, the price has gone up on this unit to $60 as well]. Both let you put all your eggs in the HDMI basket and clear your cable clutter, while simplifying your TV remote input dance as you try to get the audio and video sorted.

We're hoping to get our hands on one of these units soon and we'll let you know how it performs.

Thanks to Michael W. for the tip.

After my post earlier this week about transmitting Mac audio, readers contacted me about extending this solution. Although they liked the idea of direct audio while working out on a treadmill or exercise bike, several stated that they also wanted to watch from the sofa once the spouse or the kid go to sleep. The idea was the same: audio transmission to an iPhone or iPod touch. The source was different. They wanted to watch live cable TV or their TiVo. And for the punchline, their media center Mac lacks a tuner. Was there a similar quiet Mac-based solution that would let them transmit the TV audio from these non-Mac sources?

If your Mac has a microphone jack, internal or even through an external USB solution, the answer is yes. You can easily connect your TV audio to your Mac just like you would connect it to a pair of speakers. Run a cable between a spare audio output (modern TVs usually offer more than one, if not, you can use a splitter) to the microphone jack on the Macintosh. On my low-end TV, this means an RCA stereo cable that feeds to a standard stereo minijack plug.

Setting up the Mac host is simple. Instead of feeding audio via Soundflower, as described in the earlier post, choose your microphone audio input in the Skype settings. Start a call to your iPhone or iPod touch, switch the TV source (usually via a "Source" button that picks which signal to watch, such as Composite 1, Component 2, etc.) to your normal cable or TiVo input. Set the external speaker volume to zero. The signal arrives at the Mac microphone independently of those speakers.

You may find that the audio out signal tends to be on the low side. Many TV speakers provide their own amplification. If this is a problem for you, you can hook in an inline amplifier. (I use an old Radio Shack 277-1008C.) Alternatively, you can boost the audio via a third party program like Rogue Amoeba's Audio Hijack Pro.

This solution takes a few more cables, components, and connections than the Mac Audio-to-iPhone through Skype set-up discussed in the earlier post. But if you have the cables on-hand already, it offers an inexpensive solution compared to many other wireless TV headsets on the market right now.

Radio just isn't the way it used to be. It's not that "this ain't your father's radio." This isn't even the radio you knew five years ago. A loosening of media ownership rules (via the 1996 Telecommunications Act) has transformed what was once a local medium into more of a national one, one that put playing more "safe" mainstream material repeatedly in place of diverse content. And while Internet streaming has opened our ears to specific tastes that align with our listening palettes, it didn't align with our increasingly mobile lifestyles. The advent of the App store, however, has created an ecosystem of apps that stream audio content while also aligning with our mobile lifestyles, and I'll highlight a few of my essentials.