TidBITS#763/24-Jan-05
=====================
As the hubbub of Macworld Expo recedes, we turn to more reflective
topics, with Glenn Fleishman's book review of Revolution in the
Valley, Andy Hertzfeld's collection of stories from the early days
of Apple and the Macintosh. Matt Neuburg also contributes a look
at why Rogue Amoeba's Audio Hijack Pro is even more useful than
it might initially seem. News is slow this week, with coverage
of Pepsi trying once again to give away tracks in the iTunes
Music Store, and an update to Entourage 2004's junk mail filter.\Topics:
MailBITS/24-Jan-05
Continuous Revolution
Why Go Pro (Audio Hijack Pro, That Is)
Hot Topics in TidBITS Talk/24-Jan-05
<http://www.tidbits.com/tb-issues/TidBITS-763.html>
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Copyright 2005 TidBITS: Reuse governed by Creative Commons license
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MailBITS/24-Jan-05
------------------
**Pepsi Tries Again with the iTunes Music Store** -- After last
year's botched promotion in which Pepsi put codes for free songs
from the iTunes Music Store under the caps of 100 million bottles
of soda, only 5 million of which were redeemed by consumers,
Apple and Pepsi are trying again. From 31-Jan-05 through
23-May-05, Pepsi will attempt to put 200 million codes for
free songs in specially marked bottles of colored sugar water;
the odds of winning are estimated to be 1 in 3, though Pepsi
carefully notes that the actual odds are based on how many game
pieces are actually produced. Interestingly, the official rules
state that Apple is not a sponsor of the promotion.
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=07398>
<http://news.com.com/2100-1025-5201676.html>
<http://www.apple.com/itunes/pepsi/>
In related iTunes Music Store trivia, Apple just announced that
the iTunes Music Store has now sold over 250 million songs, and
is selling a million tracks per day. [ACE]
<http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2005/jan/24itms.html>
**Microsoft Updates Entourage Spam Filter** -- Microsoft has
released Junk E-mail Filter Update 1 for Microsoft Entourage 2004
via the package's Microsoft AutoUpdate utility (if you've set it
not to check automatically, choose Help > Check for Updates from
any Office 2004 application to launch AutoUpdate). The 2.9 MB
update includes more current definitions of which email messages
should be considered junk; since Entourage 2004 relies on spam
definitions developed and constantly adjusted by Microsoft,
updates are essential to keep the spam filter working. For more
information on using Entourage 2004's junk mail filter, see Tom
Negrino's "Take Control of What's New in Entourage 2004" ebook;
it includes a coupon for $5 off Michael Tsai's excellent SpamSieve
utility if you would prefer to use a Bayesian-based approach to
filtering spam that learns from the mail you actually receive.
[ACE]
<http://www.microsoft.com/mac/products/entourage2004/entourage2004.aspx>
<http://www.microsoft.com/mac/autoupdate/description/0409OPIM110002.htm>
<http://www.tidbits.com/takecontrol/entourage-2004.html>
Continuous Revolution
---------------------
by Glenn Fleishman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Andy Hertzfeld has stories to tell. Dozens of them. And if
you ever owned a 128K Macintosh, aspired to own one, or admired
the work behind that extraordinary box, Hertzfeld's new book
Revolution in the Valley is a charming and picaresque trip
through his personal experience in helping give birth to
the Mac.
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0596007191/tidbitselectro00/ref=nosim/>
The book is an outgrowth of Hertzfeld's Folklore.org Web site,
which he started in July 2003 to relate the pieces of the past
that have never been told, or at least not told at length. The
site itself is a demonstration of software he's developing to
let people tell stories collectively through recounting and
annotation. Because Folklore.org continues to operate on the
same basis, if you find errors in the book or take issue with
Hertzfeld's interpretation, you can visit the site and comment
on the particular anecdote.
<http://folklore.org/>
Hertzfeld has had an interesting career since leaving Apple after
the first Mac shipped in 1984; he also has just a handful of
scores to settle. Most of the time, he comes to praise, not to
bury. The book revolves around the nitty gritty of producing a
computer that had to pull off many dozens of unique tricks in
hardware and software to work at all. Apple previously and even
simultaneously suffered notable failures in putting too much
innovation in one box - the Apple III, the Lisa - and being able
to deliver at a reasonable price and performance.
(Don't flame me, Lisa fans: Steve Jobs raided Lisa team members
and innovation to squeeze into the Mac, helping to doom the
earlier machine. As Hertzfeld recounts, Lisa architect Rich Page
screamed during an early Mac/Lisa cross-team briefing, "You guys
don't know what you're doing! ... The Macintosh is going to
destroy the Lisa! The Macintosh is going to ruin Apple!" And for
you Apple III fans... what am I saying? There are no Apple III
fans. Although I did spend some time entering data into an Apple
III around 1980, however, it didn't give me any profound insight
into the machine.)
Hertzfeld didn't compile a straightforward narrative for the
book, and it shows its roots as anecdotes and short stories
on a Web site in two ways: first, it meanders quite pleasantly
around amusing stories, doubling back into a past that's already
told to extract another nugget. Second, Hertzfeld used some of
the comments left on his Folklore.org site to annotate his book,
including those that contradict or critique his memory. The book
would have benefited from more of this back-and-forth, actually,
as a number of comments on the Web site are quite pointed,
poignant, or just credulous about the accuracy of certain stories.
**The Hacker Hero** -- The book does have a hero and a villain,
and a few lesser good and evil figures. The hero is Burrell Smith,
the hilariously weird hardware genius who came up with many of the
strangest and most successful ideas of squeezing more performance
out of the Macintosh motherboard. He also should earn Mac owners
undying love for trying, unsuccessfully, to insert an expansion
port and upgradable RAM into the first Mac.
Jobs and the Mac's conceptual father Jef Raskin agreed that
the Mac shouldn't have a slot because it would add cost and
complexity. Smith was told by Jobs that "there was no way the
Mac would even have a single slot." But Hertzfeld notes that
"Burrell was not easily thwarted... After talking it over with
Brian [Howard], they decided to call it the 'diagnostic port'
instead of a slot, arguing that it would save money during
manufacturing if testing devices could access the processor
bus to diagnose manufacturing errors." But the engineering
manager Rod Holt spotted the subterfuge. "That thing's really
a slot, right? You're trying to sneak in a slot!...Well that's
not going to happen!"
Ah, well; we had to wait until the Macintosh II for a full-fledged
slot. And, surprise, a company founded by none other than Burrell
Smith - a little firm named Radius - took incredible of advantage
of that slot to offer advanced graphics cards that helped
establish the Mac's early preeminence in desktop publishing
and illustration. (When I worked at the Kodak Center for Creative
Imaging in the early 1990s, we had at least a few hundred thousand
dollars in Radius cards and monitors.) Hertzfeld notes on his
site in response to a comment that Smith is now quite private
and has been retired from commercial work since leaving Radius
many years ago.
Other members of the team have also left the technology realm.
Bill Atkinson, for instance, became a full-time photographer
after many years of intense work. I met Bill in 1991 at the
Center for Creative Imaging where he was attending a special
design invitational along with John Sculley and a host of
designers, photographers, and illustrators. (That's where
I overheard a Kodak employee, while demoing a terrible piece
of software to John Sculley, explain how keyboard commands
were better than mouse commands. "No," Sculley said quietly,
"they're not.") Hertzfeld's picture of Atkinson shows him as
rather prickly and sensitive, although that's partly because
Atkinson's role in the Lisa was largely ignored, and he didn't
want to be pushed to the sidelines again.
Other minor heroes include Bud Tribble, who at the time was
pursuing a medical degree while writing memory management
software. (Tribble left Apple, later joined Hertzfeld at Eazel,
and eventually returned to Apple a couple of years ago.)
**The Manager Villain** -- You're expecting me to say Steve Jobs,
right? Wrong.
The villain of the story is Bob Belleville, the Mac's engineering
manager for Hertzfeld's last couple of years at Apple. Hertzfeld
seems least fair in presenting a pretty one-sided and nasty
picture of Belleville. He may have been a poor manager or out
of his depth - I don't know whether that's accurate - but he's
the least fleshed-out person in the book. Everyone else emerges
as quirky and interesting, even when they're screaming at
Hertzfeld. Belleville is his bete noire, and a nasty cipher.
Also interesting is that Jef Raskin appears quite positively
in the book. Raskin has spent a lot of time since leaving Apple
well before the Mac shipped trying to prevent Apple and others
from erasing his name from the history books as the conceptual
originator of the Macintosh's core concepts. Raskin deserves to
be placed front and center as the person who pulled together ideas
that he had been writing about and lecturing about since the 1960s
into a single project with funding. The fact that Jobs stripped
him of control and his role, and that the ultimate Macintosh has
significant differences from what his general vision and specific
hardware choices were, shouldn't lessen the appreciation of his
role.
Hertzfeld's recollection of Raskin is as a fun and creative
manager with an imperious and professorial manner who helped bond
a team together around a common and unique vision. Without Raskin,
as Hertzfeld relates it, the Lisa would have been Apple's flagship
with incremental improvements, rather than revolutionary ones.
Jobs's spearheading of the Mac led it to success because he was
constantly overriding and micromanaging the project for good or
bad - but the project received staff, resources, and his laser-
beam attention.
Steve Jobs ultimately drove Hertzfeld to distraction, and also
appears as a paper-thin caricature. But that may be the only
Steve Jobs that anyone who works with him gets to know. Jobs
pushes his staff to work crazy hours, makes last-minute changes,
and pursues insane technical decisions. When Smith shows a blowup
of the blueprint of the latest motherboard layout, Jobs says,
"That part's really pretty... but look at the memory chips.
That's ugly. The lines are too close together." When an engineer
points out that no one will see the board, Jobs replies, "I'm
gonna see it! I want it to be as beautiful as possible, even if
it's inside the box. A great carpenter isn't going to use lousy
wood for the back of a cabinet, even though nobody's going to
see it." (It's clear Jobs was never a carpenter.) He makes the
team design a pretty board, and when it doesn't work, they revert
back to the functional design.
More typically, Jobs pursues dead ends, such as an Alps-designed
3.5 inch floppy disk drive; fortunately cooler heads at Apple
maintained a back channel to Sony (who provided the final 3.5 inch
drives), which involved sometimes hiding a Japanese engineer in
a closet in an Apple building when Jobs unexpectedly popped by.
On the other hand, Jobs does make a number of key decisions
along the development process that make the Mac what it was,
from case design to aspects of its performance. The man couldn't
stop poking, but he did bring out the best in his engineers,
a trait that he has apparently retained to this day.
Hertzfeld describes how he and a few other key Apple people had
dinner with Jobs after Sculley organized the board coup that
removed virtually all of Jobs's control of the company, despite
being the titular chairman of the board. It's the most human
picture of Jobs in the book. And it's clear from the story that
Jobs was never going to be in a position to be fired by anyone
ever again.
Bill Gates also comes across as a villain, appearing frequently
in the guise of Coyote, twisting words and using his magic bag
of tricks to seize patents and ideas.
**Hertzfeld's Journey** -- It was exciting to read Hertzfeld's
first-person accounts of developing the software for Thunderscan,
a scanner-head replacement for the ImageWriter's print head built
by a company that needed his help in making it fast and slick; and
Switcher, the original context-changing tool for running multiple
programs at once on the Mac.
I remember the excitement of owning my first Macintosh Plus, and
remember buying an upgrade toolkit with more RAM (static strip,
long Allen screwdriver, and case cracker) - and then seeing the
glory of the signatures on the inside of the case as I put in a
whopping four megabytes of RAM.
I can't say that Hertzfeld doesn't have an ego, but most of the
stories he tells are about other people. He doesn't put himself
front and center except in some of the most painful incidents,
which typically involve Steve Jobs either demanding something
of him or putting him in a position where other people are asking
him not to listen to Jobs, his nominal uber-boss.
Hertzfeld ends the story before joining Radius, helping to found
General Magic, and then being back with many original Apple
developers at Eazel. We don't quite know how the last 20 years
treated him because the universal interest in Apple doesn't
necessary extend to those other firms. And perhaps the statute
of limitations on telling the blunt truth (as he sees it) extends
back 20 years.
Why Go Pro (Audio Hijack Pro, That Is)
--------------------------------------
by Matt Neuburg <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Rogue Amoeba's Audio Hijack Pro is a great program, but it seems
to me that the developer's own Web pages fail to explain exactly
why. The conceptual difficulty is that Audio Hijack Pro occupies
two niches at once - it does two quite different things. So, in
reading about it, if you don't particularly want it for the first
thing it does, the second thing it does might not even register
upon your consciousness. Yet this second thing is extremely cool
and, as far as I can tell, quite unique.
<http://www.rogueamoeba.com/audiohijackpro/>
**First Things First** -- The first thing Audio Hijack Pro does is
simple to describe: it records to a sound file any sound that your
computer is generating. To see why this is useful, think about
sounds your computer generates from time to time that you might
like to record to a file. For example, you might be listening to
an audio stream via the Internet using RealPlayer - a live radio
station webcast, perhaps, or a replay of some earlier show. With
RealPlayer, there is no sound file: you download a tiny file to
start with, but that's essentially just a URL. The actual sound
exists only as it streams. But that sound is coming out of your
computer, so with Audio Hijack Pro, you can record it. Similarly
you can record the soundtrack from a DVD that you watch with DVD
Player. And so forth - if any application on your computer is
generating sound, you can record it.
<http://www.real.com/>
The recording that Audio Hijack Pro generates can be a sound
file in any of several standard compressed or uncompressed
formats: 16-bit AIFF, 24-bit AIFF, MP3, AAC, or Apple's new
lossless (ALAC) format. Also, what's generating the sound doesn't
have to an application; it can be a port. So, if sound appears at
your built-in microphone, your Line In port, or at your USB port
through a "breakout box" such as the Griffin iMic or RadioSHARK,
or any of a large number of other more-sophisticated devices, you
can record it. For example, if I want to make a quick audio note
to myself, I can set Audio Hijack Pro to record from the internal
microphone to a highly compressed 32 Kbps MP3 file and just speak
directly at my computer. At the other end of the scale of sound
quality and file size, I can digitize a cassette tape or vinyl
LP of classical music by recording in 24-bit AIFF format from
my Tascam USB box, to which my stereo system is hooked up.
<http://www.griffintechnology.com/products/imic/>
<http://www.griffintechnology.com/products/radioshark/>
<http://www.tascam.com/Products/US-122.html>
Even if this is does interest you, though, you still might not
feel that it's worth paying $32 for Audio Hijack Pro. Granted,
$32 is not a lot of money; but there are alternatives that are
cheaper still. There's Audio Hijack's non-Pro little brother,
Audio Hijack, which is only $16, and does the same thing. The main
difference is that Audio Hijack records only to 16-bit AIFF files;
you can set the sample rate, but that's your only choice. Still,
AIFF is the best format for editing your sound files, and you can
always use iTunes or any other QuickTime-savvy program to convert
from AIFF to one of those other formats afterwards; so you might
reasonably feel that the capability to record directly to a
compressed format on the fly is no great advantage. Plus, even
Audio Hijack has competitors: Ambrosia Software's new WireTap Pro
(which replaces their earlier free WireTap) is just $19 and can
record to various formats. There is also the free Jack OS X,
though this requires a separate application to generate the final
sound file, and is more work to set up. And if all you want to
do is record the sound coming into your computer, you might be
happier with a program such as the $30 Amadeus II, which records
the sound, lets you edit it (including click and pop removal and
application of many other effects and filters), and can save
to more file formats - and costs less - than Audio Hijack Pro.
<http://www.rogueamoeba.com/audiohijack/>
<http://www.ambrosiasw.com/utilities/wiretap/>
<http://www.jackosx.com/>
<http://www.hairersoft.com/Amadeus.html>
**Plug It In, Plug It In** -- This brings us to the second thing
Audio Hijack Pro does: it can process the sound digitally as
it records it. It does this by means of plug-ins, some of
which are included with Audio Hijack Pro, and some of which
are already present on your computer (you're free to install
others as well). Indeed, one of the best-kept secrets of
Mac OS X is that it includes a number of astoundingly powerful
digital signal processing plug-ins, including a 31-band graphic
equalizer, a compressor, a limiter, and high-pass and low-pass
filters. If you've used GarageBand you may have noticed these
effects, but they are also available to any AudioUnits-savvy
sound application - and that includes Audio Hijack Pro. And
AudioUnits are not the only flavor of plug-in that Audio Hijack
Pro can handle. It has its own plug-in format, called 4FX, and
comes with nearly two dozen functions, good mostly for adjusting
gain and balance. Plus it recognizes LADSPA plug-ins, a format
originating on Linux; many free LADSPA plug-ins are available,
and a handful come with the program. Finally, Audio Hijack Pro
accepts VST plug-ins, many of which are both commercial and free.
<http://www.apple.com/ilife/garageband/mix.html>
<http://www.ladspa.org/>
<http://www.kvraudio.com/get.php?mode=results&st=q&s=8>
The great part is that you can apply multiple effects at once.
It works like a simple patch board: you can apply effects in
series, in parallel, or both. The interface is brilliantly
efficient: it's just a grid, which operates as a sequence of
columns - all effects in column 1 are applied in parallel before
proceeding in series to column 2, and so forth. The sound coming
from your computer passes through the effects before your hear
it and before it goes to a file; thus you can monitor what
you're doing to the sound as you record it. As you're listening,
you can turn any effect off and on just by clicking a button,
to distinguish what it's doing to your sound; and you can
experiment with whatever adjustments in gain or parameters
each effect permits.
Bear in mind, furthermore, that you are under no obligation to
apply your effects when you _originally_ record the sound. You
can just as easily record the sound without effects to start
with, then play that recording to make a new recording to which
you apply effects. Indeed, you can apply effects to a recording
that you didn't create yourself in the first place. This means
that Audio Hijack Pro can function as an amazingly inexpensive
remastering laboratory. Let's say, for example, that I've obtained
an MP3 of one of the old radio Goon Shows. It's good, but I'd
like to sweeten up the sound a bit, and I'd like to remove some
high-frequency artifacts. So I play the MP3 through iTunes, which
I have "hijacked" with Audio Hijack Pro, applying the Excitifier
and LowPass effects. As I listen, I tweak the effects parameters
until I like the results; then I go back to the beginning of the
MP3, set Audio Hijack Pro to record to an MP3 of the same quality
as the original, and play through the entire thing. When I'm done,
I've got a new MP3 that sounds a little nicer. (Transforming an
MP3 to another MP3 usually involves some drop in quality, because
MP3 is lossy, but in this case the overall effect is positive
because there was no particular fidelity to maintain in the first
place.) Again, at the high end of sound quality, I could start
with a 24-bit AIFF recorded from a vinyl LP and play that through
iTunes, applying a little equalization and compression and ending
with a dither effect, and recording to a 16-bit AIFF; presto,
I've just used Audio Hijack Pro to master an audio CD. (And to
top it all off, I can even burn that audio CD directly from
Audio Hijack Pro.)
<http://www.thegoonshow.net/>
Now there are, of course, other ways to apply effects, and other
ways to master. In a program like Amadeus II, you simply select
a stretch of audio and apply the effect directly: the calculations
are made, and the audio is rewritten. The disadvantage of Audio
Hijack Pro's approach is that the effect is applied live: the only
way to pass a sound through an effect is by playing the entire
sound, so the time required to apply the effect is the sound's
duration. But the advantage of Audio Hijack Pro's approach is
the very same thing - the effect is applied live. This means that
you can monitor the effect as it is applied, and can even make
adjustments in real time (for example, you might wish to turn up
the compression for one part of a recording a bit more than for
another part). Furthermore, I don't know of any other application
at anything like this low price that lets you apply multiple
effects in parallel and series so simply as Audio Hijack Pro.
**More Than Meets the Ear** -- Audio Hijack Pro is full of extra
features and capabilities at which I haven't even hinted so far.
You can record the sound output of more than one application at
once (each being routed separately to its own file), or record
one application while listening through your speakers to another.
You can set a recording to stop automatically after a certain
amount of time - good for preventing a sound file from becoming
huge while you're distracted by the phone. You can set up Audio
Hijack Pro to record from a certain application at a certain date
and time - good for recording the upcoming broadcast of Car Talk
via Internet radio while you're out for a run. You can have
recordings automatically be split into multiple files as they
are created, either at timed intervals or during long silences
(so as to separate them into tracks, for instance). You can have
Audio Hijack Pro tell the sound application what file to open
(or what AppleScript program to run) before it begins recording -
thus you might set RealPlayer to switch automatically to the
desired Internet radio station, for instance. You can also
have it run an AppleScript script after recording is finished,
to post-process the recording file (adding it, perhaps, to a
particular iTunes playlist).
Seen in the full light of what it can do, Audio Hijack Pro
seems a bargain at $32. The program is constantly being improved.
The manual could be more complete, but support is excellent, and
there are user forums moderated patiently and helpfully by the
developers. A clever demo system allows you to try before you buy:
the program works normally, but adds some static to any recording
longer than about 10 minutes until it is registered. The download
is less than 3 MB. Audio Hijack Pro requires Mac OS X 10.2.7
or later.
<http://www.rogueamoeba.com/forum/cgi-bin/forumdisplay.cgi?action=topics
&forum=Audio+Hijack+Pro+Talk&number=2&DaysPrune=45>
<http://rogueamoeba.com/audiohijackpro/download.php>
Hot Topics in TidBITS Talk/24-Jan-05
------------------------------------
by TidBITS Staff <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
The second URL below each thread description points to the
discussion on our Web Crossing server, which will be much
faster.
**New WireTap vs Audio Hijack Pro Thread** -- Readers compare two
popular programs used to record streaming Internet radio and other
audio on the Mac. (6 messages)
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tlkthrd=2436>
<http://emperor.tidbits.com/TidBITS/Talk/293>
**Long term maintenance of domain names** -- Currently,
maintaining domain names is a job for the technically inclined,
but some partial solutions are available for people who may not
be versed in the Internet's plumbing. (11 messages)
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tlkthrd=2435>
<http://emperor.tidbits.com/TidBITS/Talk/292>
**Mac and TV convergence** -- What does it mean to watch TV on
your computer? And does it even make sense at all? (7 messages)
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tlkthrd=2441>
<http://emperor.tidbits.com/TidBITS/Talk/298>
**Mac mini** -- The discussion of Apple's new Mac mini continues
unabated. (93 messages)
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tlkthrd=2428>
<http://emperor.tidbits.com/TidBITS/Talk/288>
**Apple's Cash Hoard** -- Spurred on by Apple's last record
financial quarter, people wonder if Apple could drop the price
of the Mac mini even further, taking a loss in order to boost
market share. (18 messages)
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tlkthrd=2434>
<http://emperor.tidbits.com/TidBITS/Talk/291>
$$
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