Ted Landau's User Friendly View - Three Cheers and a Jeer

by Ted Landau
February 23rd, 2006

This month's column offers a grab bag of recommendations for several hardware products: a device for transferring audio to your Mac, a new device for playing your iPod in a car, and a previously promised comparison of two competing products for playing TV on your Mac.

Instant Music. I have a collection of about 200 LPs sitting in cartons in my basement. As you might imagine, given their location, I almost never play them. Recently, I decided it was finally time to do something about this. What I wanted was an easy way to transfer the LPs to my Mac so I could play them in iTunes.

As luck would have it, I recently came across exactly the right tool for the job: ADS's Instant Music, available for a street price of US$40.

Instant Music comes with everything you need to move music from a turntable (or similar devices, such as a cassette player) to your Mac. Well, almost everything (I'll explain the one exception in a moment).

You get the Instant Music device itself (a small lightweight white box), all the essential cables, plus a copy of Roxio's CD Spin Doctor 2 (which is the Mac software that captures the incoming audio and saves it to a file). Yes, you get version 2 even though the latest version is CD Spin Doctor 3. But Instant Music is not picky. It will work with version 3 (if you buy it) or just about any other audio capture software you may have.

The one additional component you may need to purchase is a pre-amplifier, required to boost the line output from most turntables (unless you already have something such as a receiver connected in between the turntable and Instant Music). The simplest solution is to get a small inexpensive pre-amp, such as the $40 GE unit available from Circuit City. Total cost of Instant Music and the pre-amp: $80.

Instant Music connects to your Mac via a USB port, providing what is generally higher quality and more reliable audio than you would get from the Mac's audio input port. With Spin Doctor's filters, you can easily reduce the hiss and cracks often present in old LPs, to produce a file that truly sounds better than the original. With one more button click, you can send the music to iTunes, in your choice of audio formats.

Instant Music offers the best combination of price, quality and convenience that I have yet found. But realistically, and contrary to the name of the product, this is still a time consuming process. For starters, there's the wait while each album plays in real time. Applying the filters (including figuring out exactly what filter settings work best) plus editing the track divisions (if they are not created correctly via Spin Doctor's automatic pilot) takes additional time. Finally, it takes yet more time to import the music to iTunes and/or copy it to a CD. You could easily spend 90 minutes or more to get just one LP transferred.

The dollar cost may not be worth it if you only plan to use Instant Music once or twice. The time and hassle cost may not be worth it if your hope is to do it for hundreds of LPs. But if you are anywhere in the middle, Instant Music is what you want.

TuneBase FM for iPod. A few months ago, I recommended Newer Technology's Road Trip+ as my preferred low-cost choice for a device to play an iPod in a car. At less than $30, it was hard to beat, playing music and charging your iPod at the same time.

If you are willing to spend more money, but still stay want to remain under $100, I have a new recommendation: Belkin's TuneBase FM for iPod at $80 retail. It works essentially the same way as the RoadTrip+, plugging in to your car's cigarette lighter outlet on one end and your iPod's Dock connector on the other. However, it offers two significant advantages over the RoadTrip+:

• First and foremost, RoadTrip+ is just a cable that hangs loose from the lighter plug. TuneBase FM, in contrast, comes with a cradle where you insert the iPod (there are adapters for the different iPod models). The cradle is in turn connected to a flexible steel neck that remains stable after bending it into position.

The result is that the iPod can be placed so that you can read the display with just a glance and conveniently access the controls with one hand (such as to skip a song). It is almost as good as having an in-dash unit. Just don't be tempted to watch movies on a video iPod while driving!

• Second, you can set TuneBase to play through almost any empty FM signal, rather than just one frequency (as is the case with RoadTrip+). And unlike some other competitors, TuneBase does this without requiring any software be installed on the iPod. It is all handled from the buttons on the cradle, which can also be used to memorize up to four frequencies for later recall.

The only negative is that I have to take my iPod out of its plastic case in order to insert it in the TuneBase cradle. With RoadTrip+, I can connect the cable with the iPod still enclosed in its case.

Warning: The current version of RoadTrip+ does not work with the video iPod (it produces an annoying hiss while music is playing, unless the iPod's backlight remains on). The vendor says they are working to fix this.

EyeTV vs. EvolutionTV. In my December column, I promised I would contrast my impressions of Elgato's EyeTV 200 vs. Miglia's EvolutionTV. Since then, both companies have updated their software. I have now had a chance to work with both devices using their latest software.

The hardware for both products are comparable. That is, they are both capable of producing a picture of reasonably high quality, at least from the cable TV connection I used in my tests. EyeTV is a bit more convenient as it does not require a separate power adapter, but they are otherwise similar.

What sets them apart is their software. Contrasting the two programs would be a instructive way to start off a course in "human interface design."

EyeTV is simply superb. Its displays are attractive and easy to understand. The features work just as expected, making a user guide almost superfluous. Even Apple could pick up a few pointers from EyeTV. In contrast, EvolutionTV trips over its shoelaces at the starting gate. Its interface is confusing, its features are unnecessarily limited and, even after searching its inadequate manual, you will still be left befuddled.

EyeTV is especially great for scheduling recordings. All it takes is two clicks. One click brings up the TitanTV schedule (now integrated into EyeTV itself so you do not have to shift to a Web browser). One more click and you are set to record the show you selected. After the recording is complete, you can instantly play it back in EyeTV. Optionally, you set EyeTV to automatically convert a recording to an iPod-compatible format. It all works so effortlessly that I have just about given up using my TV-connected DVD and VHS recorders. The only downside is that, if I want to view a show on something other than my Mac, I pretty much need to copy it to a DVD. When there is a no-hassle out-of-the-box way to play video via a wireless connection from my Mac to a TV (as you can do with audio via an AirPort Express), my conversion to EyeTV will be complete.

With EvolutionTV, I had trouble with almost everything. Figuring out how to schedule a recording was not too hard. It also uses TitanTV (through a Web browser) as well as iCal synchronization (which was a bit confusing, as it kicked in even though I did not request it). A bigger problem was that I could just about not get a recorded program to playback. There seemed no direct way to play back a recording in EvolutionTV itself except somewhat awkwardly via a mode designed to edit movies rather than play them. Playing the movie in QuickTime Player would not work because the movie was saved in a DVD-compliant MPEG-2 compression format that QuickTime could not understand. While I eventually found a way to change the compression scheme for future recordings, there seemed no way to convert an already created file.

By the way, the command to edit movies is contained in an Action pop-up menu accessed by clicking the Post-process Movie button in the Scheduled Recordings screen. Not the most obvious location. This menu also includes "Play movie" and "Add to iTunes Library" commands, but they resulted in the same playback failures I just described. Making matters worse, the User Guide makes no mention of this Action menu nor any of its options!

Where EyeTV lets you have several TV windows open at once (such as one showing live TV while another plays a recorded program), EvolutionTV is so modally restricted that you cannot even open its Preferences window while its lone TV window is open.

And the list goes on. Perhaps, with a better manual and more effort, I might have discovered that EvolutionTV has less limitations that it appears. But why bother? EyeTV already does whatever I want without any effort at all.

Ted Landau is the founder of MacFixit, and the author of Mac OS X Help Line, Tiger Edition and other Mac help books.

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