AFAIK, the mighty mouse is going to be shipped with Macs from now on (it's essentially a one button mouse that can be programmed if the user want to). But as Dibrom has pointed out, the OS is designed so that it's not necessary and most users are happy with just the one button. Drivers for 3rd party mice are all built in to OSX anyways, so if you're a Windows user who's used to contextual menus, you can just plug in your old mouse and start right clicking away.

oh my god! i agree with roberto!

anyway ... i'm sure apple would love to have 20, 30, 40, percent of the market share ... but is not aneasy thing ... MS had a lot of good marketing (to call it some not harsh way), and they are now a the facto standard ... think like this: it is even dificutl to MS itself to make users upgrade from 98, 2000, and even 95 to XP ... i bet 99% of the people with XP have got it with their machines ... thanks for all us ... vista is comming, and it would be the begin of the end of MS monopoly.

adlai is talking about audio software before switching on MacOS, and is not requesting any opinion about mice and OS design. I recall TOS#5:



Dibrom: I remind you a wise advice you were used to post in the first time of HA.org: "don't feed the troll". And if you have some time to loose, instead of defending MacOS and Apple's animals or presenting inherent advantages in this OS (personaly, I don't care), it would be better IMO to update your List of recommended LAME compiles in order to keep some coherence with current List of recommended LAME settings. Thanks

And if you find two additional minutes, don't forget to clean the totally outdated advices pinned in this thread: it's a shame for HA.org to offer to fresh member such wrong information.



EDIT: mouses -> mice

Apple's standard mouse is no longer produced. They ship the last supplies they have and will replace the standard mouse with the Mighty Mouse soon. (At least a news article I read a short while ago said that.)

While I prefer a multi button mouse myself, I don't see too much trouble in pressing the mouse button a little longer to open the context menu.

EDIT: Oops, didn't see guruboolez' post above. Sorry, I won't post more OT stuff here.

Too funny

It would be blind zealotry if I didn't have something reasonable to say about it, but in fact, I've already said quite a bit.

That the Mac has traditionally had one button actually follows from the design philosophy of their operating system user interface. You might understand some more if this if you read the HIG. Instead, you seem to think it's just dumb, because you're used to having two buttons on wintel.

A single mouse button by Apple has a lot more to do with design philosophy than from ignorance. You might disagree with their philosophy on that, but that doesn't automatically make it stupid. Especially if you can't find some reasonable criticism to make other than that you need two mouse buttons so you can scratch your balls with your other hand at the same time...

Talk about blind zealotry...

Thanks for the responses and links. Now I'm seriously considering a Mac. It would also help with keeping me from playing video games... always a good thing.

I just need confirmation on if Cog or xACT can do batch encodes from .ape to lame mp3, encoder of my choosing. I could live with using FLAC from now on, it's about the same as APE anyways. Also, I'm considering the iBook, and was wondering if an upgrade to 1gb of RAM (from 512 mb) is worth it.

Nope, Cog is strictly a player and xACT is strictly lossless. You'd need to decode your APE's to WAV/AIFF with xACT and then encode with iTunes-Lame. Of course, if you're feeling command line friendly you could use MAC and LAME in the Terminal.

EDIT: I'm not sure if they still run under Tiger but QTConvert in conjunction with QT LAME Framework would be an alternative to iTunes-LAME, though I don't know which release of LAME it uses and you can't select VBR. ALAC & AAC is a more convenient combination on a MAC but I tend towards FLAC and AAC/Vorbis (converted with flaac 0.5 or Toast 7 for Vorbis)

512mb is pretty much the minimum for running Tiger so I'd definitely advise you to upgrade. Normally it's much cheaper to use third party RAM (Crucial have an excellent reputation) but I believe the iBook has only one memory slot so it might actually be cheaper to have your iBook shipped with more.

Doh. Although, theoretically, couldn't one make a commandline script that would do the batch encode function that I desire?

Yes, theoretically

A couple of people on a Mac newsgroup whipped me up various shell scripts to convert straight from ALAC to FLAC but I couldn't get them to work. See my edit above for alternative suggestions.

Enough of this Mac vs PC thread! I'm buying a TRS-80.

I've been using Macs and PCs extensively since 1985. Right now we have two higher-end Dells, with their two-button mice and scroll wheels, and two modern G5s with their one-button mice, in our lab. I use both platforms equally, a total of 4-6 hours a day, 5 days a week. I prefer to use the one-button mouse for graphics, video and audio editing, and general work. It just feels nicer in my hand, more balanced and natural. The one-button mouse has NOT been a mistake so far for Apple, most Mac users at work have NOT gone to a conventional two-button third-party mouse, even though it would not cost them anything.
Not to say there is no room for possible improvement for some users with the new Mighty Mouse.
The only time I slightly prefer the two-button mouse is when I use Microsoft Office applications.
Do you really think that Apple is too ignorant to give most users what they have preferred? Steve Jobs must be a really dumb guy! Funny how Microsoft has been forever chasing Apple's usability and GUI, even copying brushed metal http://news.com.com/2300-1012_3-5862875-2.html for one of their Vista "New Looks". Gee, they are making Access look like a bad copy of iTunes!
Do you really think that most Mac users are zealots? Some of the more illustrious individuals at our organization use Macs, and the No.1 and 2 guys in the networking department use them, in a mixed 70%Win/30%Mac shop. Funny, we have all learned to get along and respect each other's choice of platform. The Mac ridicule from the PC "zealots" stopped a few years ago after it cost us, and is still costing us, hudreds of thousands of dollars to deal with Window's viruses, spyware, adware, etc.
It sounds to me that you just hate Apple and Macs, and Mac users.
Why, I don't know.

Indeed. It would be just as valid for me to rail against MS Windows for being designed around 2-button mice since I've been using 3-button mice with X Windows for 18 years now (i.e. since the days of MS Windows 1.01).

I've never spent enough time on the Mac to be proficient, but I have no doubt that they make that one button do everything necessary, somehow. Just like MS does with two.

So, are you going to run NEWDOS-80 or LDOS?

you know, something as simple as an itunes plugin for .ape would solve everything. Is there one out?

There are no file format plugins for iTunes. You have to look for QuickTime "components", begause iTunes uses QT for playback. AFAIK there is no APE plugin/component for QT.

yes, after a bit of googling on the subject (which I have spent way too much time on) I figured out the solution: MacDrive for the PC. Encode files from the PC onto an HFS+ formatted external harddrive. Simple as that. Of course I still have the problem of backing up new cds that I get. Current solution: eac->ape->mp3-> ape burned to dvd. For a mac I suppose it could work like itunes->alac->mp3 (the itunes lame encoder can take newer compiles of lame, as well as new command lines, right?) although the lack of a dvd burner on the ibook would be a problem for archiving.

iBooks have DVD recorders since about 1.5 years ago.

Only the 14-inch model.

Oh, you're right. Sorry about that.

My two cents is that the Mac UI is bloated and made no sense (although it did some quite clever things...but the window area was damned tiny). For home use, the apps on PC IMO are far better, and whether Mac is technically superior or not, the end result is that PCs have more software, are considered by more people, and the general end use is that they are supported and catered for across the board.

+ the whole Ctrl alt and apple button thing is confusing as fuck.

To their credit, chicks seem to dig it - almost all the girls in my photo class were like "aww its so prettyyyy".

I'm sticking with my Ashen VS though eh


I'd also like to raise the idea that the length of use doesn't really hold much weight - it is the type of use - for instance, someone that coded or designed graphics may not actually do things like poweruse or know about things unspecific to their job - to put it simply, whereas some people have worked with computers for hugely long terms, the real general experience comes from living with them and using them as a hobby.

*ducks*

right, also, don't forget to mention that Windows XP is soo light and polished ...

And then there's KDE and Gnome...

Sad as it is, there aren't good, lightweight interfaces in current OSes unless you can do with horrid stuff like WindowMaker - and for Linux only.

yep, i was about to mention KDE, cause i really feel GNOME is much more light (at least on ubuntu) ... but didn't want to start a flamewar ...

edit: roberto, this counts as another coincidence!

gnome is ridiculous (useless, still)
kde is a jackhammer to a nail
light window managers are inobtrusive (enlightenment, blackbox-based, etc) but mostly less useful.

on linux, xfce4 might be the perfect medium, but most still use kde

Well, it was bad design philosophy then, and they have finally come to their senses and made a mouse ("The Mighty Mouse") with a whole bunch of buttons on it (a bit in excess imho).

You had to hold down CTRL key and click to have the same functionality as right click with the mouse. And they held on to that for years and years instead of just putting an extra button on their mice while 3rd party mice with 2+ buttons worked as they should. Now if that's not stubborn, you tell me what is...

I'm not going to bother arguing with the PC fan's who don't bother to make specific criticisms rather than saying "it doesn't make sense" or "it's no good, etc., etc.," especially when it seems pretty obvious that most of them haven't bothered to actually learn the system rather than just playing with it for a few minutes and deciding it's annoying... (not referring necessarily to you) but anyway, to your question, I'm curious what you mean exactly by "lightweight."

Aqua in 10.4 seems to be pretty lightweight to me if by that you are referring to speed. Most of the stuff is hardware accelerated now, and in fact there's even more room for improvement with some of the quartz extreme stuff which isn't currently enabled (perhaps it will be in the next release).

I find it to be pretty amazing that OS X manages to get faster with successive releases, often despite the fact that more graphical "glitz" gets added and new features are put into the OS. This, to me, seems indicative of a "lightweight" design that is easy to optimize.

I don't remember ever seeing a Windows release that ran faster on the same hardware than a version before it. I believe this has happened with some Linux desktop environments though, like Gnome and maybe KDE (I haven't used KDE enough to know).

So I'm not exactly sure why people say aqua is "bloated." Oh, and FWIW, you can use other window managers on OS X. And it sure is nice to have an Apple supported X11 server to use.

On the other hand, if by "lightweight" you mean "very short on features except what is absolutely necessary to wrap a display context with basic positional controls", well, yeah Aqua isn't necessarily "lightweight" then. But is this a usability thing (i.e., too much polish or "information" makes it hard for you to use?), or a speed thing? Because if it's a speed thing, see above again.

blackbox I would agree with as far as being "light" (i.e., it's both fast and very basic in the feature set, so it's "light" in both of those senses).

Enlightenment on the other hand, I don't see how you view as being "light." It not only used to be quite slow, but a lot of the graphical stuff it could do wasn't really all that effective from a usability point of view. And it also was a bit of a hassle to configure.

I've never tried e17 so I don't know if they've improved on either of those fronts. It looks nice from the screenshots though.

exactly the oposite than with Windows!

The amount of zealotry in this thread is reaching Stallman proportions :B

Really? Could you be a little more vague?

Anyway, I would have agreed with you... after the first two posts or so

Seriously though, I don't get what all the fuss needed to be about. Someone asked a simple question related to Macs, and the first couple of posts he received were trolls about how Macs suck. Then, when a few people tried to point out the nonsense in those posts, we got a deluge of PC fanboys saying, essentially, that anyone who doesn't think that Macs suck (whether they provided reasoned responses or not, regardless of whether the poster they responded to did) are blind zealots*.

Nice. Glad to see the denizens of HA are so reasonable in areas outside of audio.

* This being obvious because Mac's only have (or rather used to only have) a single button.

Me, being a resource-, screenspace- and simplicity-whore, actually liked blackbox for its speed....... but whenever i used it i kept asking myself "i dont get it... it would only need a single gadget here, a toolbar there, a menu over there..... and its usability would multiply...... so why dont they do it if it would be so easy? Its not as if it would make it slow or bloated - one can add the mentioned stuff manually with publically available additions, so its not even a matter of coding the stuff but just prebundling and -configuring it".

Some *nix design-philosophies escape me....... reminds me about what a buddy told me when he wanted to join NetBSD kernel-development, and was repelled by not even getting a CLI-history and good texteditor in the development package! Cheap features which multiply development-speed..... but they prever to be stuck in stone-age... whatever.

BTW: macs come most close to what would be the ideal OS for me. The only reason why i haven't switched is because of apples grip on the good applications. Of course there are exceptions, but in many cases one has no choice except of the available apple-solution.

Anyways, it will be interesting to see what OS i will choose in 2 or 3 years, because i will NOT upgrade from win2k! Neither to XP and for sure not to longhorn. Thus, sooner or later i will be forced to leave the windows-platform.

I'm a routine lurker here who reads rather regularly and as much as this is turning into a flamefest in spots, I thought I'd contribute at least my own experiences.

Having come into a fair bit of money recently, I built a rather exceptionally nice Shuttle XPC box with an E-Mu 1820M since at that particular time I did not see the OS X platform as having suitable equivalents to what I was using under Windows. Over time, that list eroded down to pretty much one application: Foobar2000. My reasons compelling me to switch to OS X weren't that I particularly hated Windows, since I don't -- however, I've found that I rather appreciate not only the simplicity but the seeming intelligence in the UI of OS X with good *BSD underpinnings.

To cite one other example, there's a feature known as Expose that does a very graphically glitzy way of causing all your open windows to shrink down and spread out across the screen to quickly select them. Sure, it's an overblown alt-tab (or command-tab given your OS), but in this case no child window can actually hide no matter how many windows you have open. This is where it gets rather smart, as you can assign corners of the screen to jab your mouse to trigger these events. Now, I often do a lot of stuff with files on my desktop and I discovered something rather slick -- I can jab my mouse to the upper right corner, where I assigned Expose to hide all windows and reveal my desktop, I can select a bunch of files and drag them.. then I can jab lower-right where I assigned Expose to reveal all my open windows scaled down -- then I can just hover my collection of files over the window I want and drop them right in. All with my mouse and rather quickly at that. This is one of the few times I ever got into mousing, given I'm such a keyboard fanatic. I've yet to actually 'outsmart' the UI in how dragging files and otherwise clicking work, it has behaved exactly as I'd hope it would. There's a few Finder-quirks I dislike (Folder sorting, etc), but that's not really a show-stopper. Speaking of keyboard fanaticism, not only are the shortcuts really consistent between apps, but the OS-wide keyboard shortcut editor is SWEET.

Given that eventually my list of applications ONLY consisted of Foobar2000 I could not replace, I broke down and bought an iMac -- especially given that it has a built in optical-out via Mini-TOSLINK. At the moment I have a mini-toslink-to-toslink cable running from the iMac to the Optical-In on my 1820M so I can use both machines from a single pair of headphones. Literally 99% of all I do on my PC is manage Foobar2000 and listen to music with it, while I work on my iMac. Sometimes I may play a game or watch some videos full-screened while working on the iMac. Obviously, this isn't a solution for everyone.

However, with the announcement here of Euphonos, I rather suspect my migration to OS X will be 100% as it could very well be everything I use Foobar2000 for if it ever surfaces -- and I'll certainly move to a PowerMac at that point, as much as I absolutely love the simplicity of the iMac's design.

I'm very much in love with OS X, however, no it doesn't offer anything like Foobar2000 or EAC at the moment. If OS X is your one and only machine then you may go missing. Cog is a nice solution for playing a variety of lesser supported formats, but it's no Foobar. Really, I can't think of higher praise for Peter's work than that he's responsible for me being tied completely to a certain platform.

Kay, back to lurking.

EDIT: P.S. Yes, I use a two button mouse with a scrollwheel. An optical Microsoft Intellimouse for extra irony, though it's also my fave mouse (I'm ambi-dex for micing, preference for left as I'm left-handed.. so I hate curved mice). I never did quite like the feel of the one-button mouse they ship as of late, but that's not an arguement against one-button mice in general.

Concerning foobar2000....... its quite probable, that in 2 years or so, this gap will be closed on linux as well as mac. A significant userbase, early-adopters and potential converts are fully aware of foobar2000 and will probably gather around Lamip and Euphonos. This in turn will make the devs of those two apps prioritize the desires of foobar2000 users. Sure, in terms of scripting and cutting-edge functionality, they may always be one step behind foobar, but that would be "good enough". Besides, i wouldn't be suprised if at least Euphonos implements some UI and social-design concepts currently lacking in foobar2000 with the result of it feeling more "polished" and "simple". Thus, there is even the possibility that over the course of time a "friendly competition" happens between those 3 audiotools.

This may be of interest. A few minutes ago I stumbled over an updated Ogg Vorbis Component for QuickTime 7 / iTunes. So far it seems to work without problems.
Get it here: http://wiki.xiph.org/index.php/OggComponent/VorbisComponent

just my fast view,

dual g4 mac with protools will need 10s to export file, on this dual pc it happens before you can say 'blink' (probably you can say 'bl').

lightwave3d version for mac is much slower as well.

---

i like how the keyboard is done on that mac thought, one cable only and you get two usb connectors on keyboard as well, perfect for my wacom and 1gigs flashram for example...., ah well, whatever.

finalcut pro is probably a good app (again probably slow without special hardware or some super fancy mac).

They stopped making dual G4's in 2002. Try the same test on a G5 and you'll be pleasantly surprised.

yes, my point exactly, when you buy such an expensive machine it will be yours, not just for one year

So if he buys a new machine, will it have the same performance as one from three years ago with an older style processor ? I love your logic.

fflooky: huh, where did you get that from?

The OP is enquiring about buying a Mac to replace his laptop. You raised your experience of the performance of a computer that is at least three years old and has a last-generation CPU. I fail to see the relevance of that experience.

You mean, when he buys a mac it is irrelevant how long it will stay competitive? Who's logic is weird now?

The G4 wasn't competitive when it was a new computer. The G5s are. I still fail to see how the performance of a three-year old computer affects that of a new one.

If the G5 performs as well as/better than another manufacturer's specific machine today, I don't see how their relative performances will alter over the next three years. Each successive release of OS X has run faster than the previous one on all of my machines without any upgrade in hardware being necessary. I don't think the same situation will obtain with the progression from XP to Vista.

I can, however, safely predict which machine will retain its value better and fetch a higher price should the OP wish to sell it to fund an upgrade

to actually answer your original post:

yes, you can rip cds and yes you can use monkey's audio. it works fine on the mac

yes you can go ape to mp3

the only issue seems to be your insistence on writing to an ntfs drive, but the mac could transform it into an hfs+ drive...

I think it really boils down to this: If you're satisfied with what iTunes + the iPod give you then the Mac is a nice integrated & simple solution. If you're used to the freedom and flexibility of the PC then you may find a Mac frustrating. I sorely miss Foobar2000 when I'm using my Mac, but I've lost a lot of the enthusiasm I had for writing a replacement. People buy Macs because they want something they can just use and I think there's going to be very little interest in iTunes alternatives, particularly as Apple moves towards iTunes as an all-in-one media system.

It also really pisses me off that Apple decided to roll their own lossless format instead of wrapping FLAC or Wavpack in DRM. I refuse to archive my music in a proprietary lossless format but you're really swimming upstream on the Mac if you try to use anything but ALAC. I have a 1200 line ruby script that does a lot of what foobar2000 does, which helps with batch transcoding etc., but it's irritating. Hopefully Dibrom's music player project will close the gap.

In some ways Apple has really learned the error of their old proprietary ways but in other ways (ALAC, Audio Units, etc) they're still pulling the same old tricks that have helped keep them in a niche market for decades.

I had the same problem as the intiator of the post - I recently bought the new MacBook Pro. Here is a great freeware program I found it's called Max

It is the EAC of the Mac world.. and it's opensource (universal binary).

Have fun.. and let's get back on topic... any more Mac encoding software suggestions from experienced Mac users would be appreciated. No more Windows, linux, Mac comparison, comments, etc., please.

I only found two posts in this whole thread with actual links to useful programs...

OoooYeah... xfce4

Care to tell me what that's supposed to mean?

Which brings me to the only reason why I don't want to convert to Mac. Here in my country it's practically impossible to find Mac apps. Dear us...

About mices and ways of working... hm I am a keyboard-oriented user so I like shortcuts better than mice... well anyways, I am for the sense that I will gladly adapt to whatever is required to get a job well done.

An analogy: If I go to the US, I'll have to shift gears using my right hand. If I go to the UK, I'll have to shift gears with my left hand. Calling either of them stupid and trying to shift gear with the other hand the car's not designed for... that's stupid.

Just my 200 IDR reply (FYI that's 2 US cents )