The Mac Experience in Business & Home: Help, Tips, Discussion & Radio Show Notes

Here’s a product I discussed on the air tonight. Having sold our so-yesterday physical phones and moved entirely to soft-phones from Counterpath (more on this in an upcoming post), we have been experimenting with various headsets.

Most of our team has settled on Logitech headsets, link here (no, I don’t own stock in the company). I am using the (Premium) Notebook Headset, and am very pleased with its sound quality. I’ve had no complaints about being able to hear me from callers, not even when I have background noise such as air conditioning, other people talking, pandemonium… well, most background noise is filtered quite nicely.

Have you ever longed for finding similar tunes based on your favorite artists & songs in your iTunes library? It’s only a click away as Pandora’s free web-based music player allows you to do just that!

Created by the Music Genome Project , Pandora offers continuous musical suggestions based on a vast library of song titles that are rated as a as a match for each station (artist or song title) you input into the player. Pandora also allows you to rate & skip songs, which assists in guiding a playlist fitted to your particular tastes while also allowing you to save stations so you can browse different styles of music without leaving the player. If you hear a song you’d like to own, direct links are available to Apple’s iTunes store, as well as Amazon.

Having “discovered” the capability accidentally just recently, I wondered when did Apple introduce this useful trick? I found out, along with solving other mysteries of iTunes, AirTunes, the Airport Express and its imitators, through visits to a local Apple Store and some good old-fashioned gumshoing, er, I mean Googling.

When Apple’s Airport Express first flew onto the market two years ago this month, you may have thought:

We had a caller looking for audio software to manage live recordings. If you’re looking for specific functions, Apple’s archives are a good place to start, that is, if GarageBand, Apple’s software free with new computers or iLife upgrades, is not enough for you:

http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/audio/

Note that the latest version of GarageBand as of this post on June 15, 2006, version 3.0.2, has a bevy of tools for podcasts, both live and canned, and should not be discounted until tried. I’ve used GarageBand for everything from recording our radio show live, through preparing ring tones for both my wife’s phone, and my own.