June 17, 2004

• I cannot address 1, as I have no clue about midi, and have only fooled around in garage band using the built in loops - but often there are play-through preferences in sound applications. Usually this is turned of to prevent feedback when people record live through a mic. 2: You can select your audio input from the sound panel in the system preferences. You will be given an list based on your options. 3: Yikes! You will want to free up a lot of space, as you want to keep at least a gig free for the system to page with. Do you have any external storage? What else do you use the computer for? Do you have classic installed? Before anyone tells you what to delete we should get an sense of what you use the machine for.
• I'll step in and answer 3 with only minor caution. If you only ever want to read American English on your powerbook, and you don't need Finnish menus (or what have you), then try this little program, which will delete the many megs of localization files from your computer. If you feel that you might need the Finder in French, then skip this advice.
• I'm going to use the computer primarily for music, some internet stuff, and as a portable word processor/DVD player when I go back to grad school. I have no need for iMovie, don't plan on copying any songs to the hard drive, and so on. One problem: It does have Classic installed. I received the computer from a friend who didn't need it anymore. He has a couple of programs installed on there that will not run in OS X, so I offered to keep them on there. I may be able to print out the documents from that program (an outdated music notation program called Mosaic) and delete it though, which would mean I could ditch OS9 if possible/necessary.
• Sandspider: I'll try that tonight. Sounds good.
• Caveats: I don't work with GarageBand, and I use an Oxygen8 instead of an Ozone. Also, I'm away from my Powerbook right now and can't double-check my settings. That said: How do I get the mic/other instruments to "talk" to the computer using a MIDI controller's input? See if "Active Channels: Inputs 1 & 2" is checked in the Ozone preference pane. ...often there are play-through preferences in sound applications. Usually this is turned of to prevent feedback when people record live through a mic. Audio/MIDI Setup -> Audio Devices -> lower left pane, checkboxes for "playthrough" (although this won't affect recording, just listening). The PowerBook is old, and only has 10 GB of hard disk space. Right now, I'm using 9 or so. Make some room! Copy everything non-important to CD backups and then throw it out! (How old is the Powerbook? I'm surprised that GarageBand runs on anything slower than a G5.)
• You need more storage even if you're not going to save a lot of music on the computer. Depending on the age of the powerbook [I'm guessing it is an old TiBook], you can probably get up to a replacement 60GB internal hard drive [it isn't pretty to upgrade but sites like http://xlr8yourmac.com/ can walk you through it]. You can then get a firewire enclosure for your old 10GB drive and run a freeware app called "carbon copy cloner" and move all your stuff from the 10GB hard drive onto your giant new drive. An alternative is to buy the larger capacity drive and a firewire enclosure and use that to store your new music and other stuff you add over time. The firewire drive can then be used on a new Mac [or PC] down the road. Getting a notebook sized hard drive is good since it is portable and can be powered off the firewire port. But if you plan on only using the external storage when you're at a desk near a power plug, the larger (and much cheaper) desktop sized ones are the way to go. Don't get a USB one since the old Powerbooks didn't have USB 2. Sorry I can't help you about the MIDI part.
• One thing that you can do to immediately save some space is to get rid of all the extra language files that you'll never use (presuming that you use English for the applications). Mike Bombich wrote a great app called DeLocalizer that will scan through your OS X volume and remove all the language files except US English (you can exclude other languages individually as well. It doesn't sound like much space would be saved, but the average I've seen is 600-700MB. (Mike states that DL is not verified for 10.3, but I've never seen any problems while running it under 10.3.)
• In regards to question 1 -- is your mic self-powered? If it's not it won't work through your PC, regardless of settings. I'm not a Mac user, but one thing that happens to me on Windows is AGC boost has a way of turning itself on. If you don't turn it off it can sound like your mic is not even connected. Maybe Mac has a similar function? Good luck.
• Great advice, all. I'm gonna zap the non-English language support and localization menus tomorrow when I hae time to download those programs. I selected the Ozone as my audio input which got it talking to GarageBand. I now am getting my recording on (was up late last night recording a goofy pop song about Sisyphus, of all things, with quotes by Sartre and Camus). My computer isn't that powerful, and I've resigned myself to not being able to hear all tracks at once (when I'm ready to mix things I'll do so on a friend's computer). However, I'll occasionally get an error message that says "disk is too slow" or something. Is that something that would be beneficially affected by freeing up space on the hard drive? Or is it a processor issue? If the latter, there's nothing I can do since evidently the processor in this particular model can't be upgraded (it's one of the early G4 Titanium models, with a 400 mHz processor).
• However, I'll occasionally get an error message that says "disk is too slow" or something. Rotational speed of the hard drive, and unaffected by free space or processor speed. Most laptop drives spin at 4200 rpm, though more recent build-to-order Powerbooks offer a 5400 rpm drive. Most desktop drives spin at 7200 rpm and this is really the optimum speed for reading/writing audio and video. There are now 7200 rpm laptop drives, such as the Hitachi Travelstar 7K60, and those titanium Powerbooks are a lot easier to get into than the new aluminum ones, so you could switch out the drive yourself if you wanted.
• Hmm, that's good to know. Once the school year begins anew and I have an income, I'l look into upgrading the hard drive, keeping rotational speed in mind.