Elgato have pretty covered most of our video needs with TV encoders (and EyeTV) for our TV capturing and editing needs. The Turbo.264 HD allows us to encode footage directly from AVCHD camcorders and virtually any other video format. Now the company tackles our analogue video needs in the form of “Video Capture”
I still consider myself a bit of a switcher from PC to Mac. I have been using my trusty Mac for a over four years now and it seems to play a growing role in all areas of life.
I have decided to list my five essential Mac hardware add-ons that I use on a very regular basis in a range of both personal and work settings. These devices not only make life easier they work so well they are worthy of a dedicated blog post.
I have been asked a few times, and most recently via twitter about how to get the most out of the Apple TV. With the dawn of Boxee many multimedia fans are looking at the Apple TV device in a whole new light. I am going to concentrate on how to get the most out of the Apple TV (but without the Boxee hack). Read our initial review of the Apple TV.
One of the most interesting updates to iTunes 8.1 is the addition of the iTunes DJ playlist. Currently my iTunes library contains over 4000 songs. Instead of culling the songs I don’t listen too or don’t even like over the years I have expanded my storage.
There is nothing more frustrating that putting a music CD into your computer to find iTunes can not identify the album or song. A long list of “Title 1″ and a long time spent renaming ahead.
A marriage of Apple and Microsoft products isn’t really what you would expect to see in a home media system but Rivet (at only $18) offers just that. Rivet sits on the your Mac and will share your music, film and photo libraries with the XBox 360.
Amazon have launched their very own music download service in the UK. Boasting the fact the songs can be played on any mp3 player and in any computer software application makes Amazon, perhaps an attractive offerings.
Apple have just released version 8 of their iTunes media management software with a host of new features. Grid mode, new visualisation engine and the new genius mode. Firstly I have to say how much I am loving grid mode. You can opt between artists, genre and album view with the ability to play the full album or double click for selected songs.
The only negative I have found is that is really highlights the missing album art although it does appear as if iTunes is now better at locating album art as I have a number of albums not available on iTunes that when I selected ‘find album art’ it was able to do so.
The new Genius features do look, well genius, that said I am naturally skeptical when people stress that data sent to Apple is anonymous. I guess what is the big deal in Apple knowing what music I listen to and how often but it really did feel quite strange that I had to log into my iTunes account to activate this anonymous feature.
When you turn on iTunes 8’s new Genius feature, information about your music library is again, anonymously sent to the iTunes Store, where it is combined with the anonymously-gathered knowledge from millions of other iTunes users and processed through Apple-developed algorithms.
The Genius results, specifically tailored to your personal music library, are sent back to your computer to enable users to automatically create Genius playlistsplaylists in iTunes and on your iPods, even when they are not connected to the Internet.
One of the Genius features displays ‘recommendations’ from the store I guess like the mini store and most users ended up turning off. You can hide these easily enough from view though.
The play lists do seem to work well, and I am no genius but it looks as it selects songs of the same tempo, volume, and perhaps style other than that there is no obvious connection. The thing is though, it works I have tried 4-5 different playlists and I am hearing songs from my 32GB of music I had completely forgotten about. Hopefully as more users start using the system it will get even better. This feature should avoid the random Metallica song appearing in a playlist when you have visitors round and you employ iTunes for the casual, relaxed background music. Metallica are great but definitely not background music for the middle aged.
I think there is only one word to describe the new visualisation system and that is stunning, here is hoping it makes its way onto the Apple TV in the near future.
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