05/11/01

The Cube nominated for a design award

The Cube (and also Apple Pro speakers and Apple's Pro Mouse) is nominated for a D&AD (British Design and Art Direction) award in the Products for Work Design categories. You can read more about that story on Macworld, and check the D&AD site.

Great deals

ExperCom is selling a bundle with the refurbished Apple PowerMac Cube G4/500 128/30.0/DVD/56k/100BT and the refurbished Apple Studio Display 15-inch LCD monitor for $1,999. A one-year Apple warranty applies to both.

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05/09/01

USB RAM drives (Part IV)

ZiO! designed by Microtech can be considered as a USB RAM drive. It also has other functionalities. According to Microtech, you can use it to "transfer all of your digital pictures, music and any other data to and from a digital camera, video recorder, MP3 player, or cell phone to a equipped Mac or PC". The ZiO! plugs directly into a standard USB port. There are several ZiOs available. With them you can use MultiMedia, SmartMedia, or CompactFlash cards. According to Microtech, you can even use the IBM Microdrive, which is the smallest disk drive in the world.

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Readers comments about the "Cube Blues" article.

Several of our readers sent us e-mails concerning the article of our columnist, Matteo. Here is what they say :

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New great desks in our Gallery!

We have posted several new great desks in our photo gallery. Take a look at them here.

05/08/01

Cube Blues or... how to get decent audio I/O with your Cube.

The G4 Cube is, for many aspects, a dream machine. Fanless, stunningly beautiful, fast (at least today...) and very expandable: two firewire ports should give you the ability of connecting theorically any bandwith-hungry peripheral.

Ok, so, what's wrong? Where's the problem? Here's my story...I understand it won't be interesting for everybody, but I believe that there are lots of folks in my situation. I'm using my Mac for Internet and everyday use, but mostly for pre-producing house music tracks. This involves using heavy music software, wich needs power and stability. I use mostly Cubase 5, a fairly good program, very complete, with some problems but many great features. I don't need a high end-quality audio I/O, since I don't record anything at home; I only get the studio recorded material on a CD, work with the Cube, go to the studio with another CD and mix and equalize all on a serious outboard mixer (there's a Mac also at the studio, btw...). The whole process I do at home is digital and so the quality of my audio setup is only going to affect my pre-listening....anyhow I wanted to get a decent thing.....

Obviously, the day I got the Cube out of the box, I installed my favourite music apps and I was ready to rock......but......as soon as I connected the amp speaker box wich comes with the Cube to my home hi-fi (wich is a $2000 cd only hi-fi, pretty decent) I noticed the very low quality of the Cube standard audio output. The bass is fake and exagerated like with a $100 boombox, the sound quality is just poor........... I was somehow disappointed since the audio I/O of my g3 233 was much better.

So I started shopping around for a decent but inexpensive simple audio interface. I soon figured out that the only serious product is the Motu 828 Firewire interface, wich gives you Motu quality multiple inputs and outputs for less than $1000. It is a good value for money, given the respectability of Motu, but I just need ONE stereo output, it wasn't an intelligent purchase for me......

Roland/Edirol makes a USB audio interface, the UA 30, wich gives a stereo in and stereo out analog/digital connection. The price is reasonable, approx 240 $, so I thought this was the way to go. I started to read every kind of information about this box and I soon understood that this is a poorly supported product : many people complain about it in the Usenet, you have to plug it after booting each time (boring!), and has pretty much incompatibility issues on the pc as well. I was told: "Man, what do you expect from a USB audio interface".....

Besides that, I didn't surrender. I soon figured out that USB interfaces, when used with a pro music application, give a very high latency value. This is a crucial problem for professionals: latency is the delay between the moment the computer wants to play a sample, and the moment is effectually played. If it is too high, this gets really annoying. But.....don't worry guys.....we have a solution..... A small german company, Propagamma makes an ASIO driver wich enables your favourite pro music app to talk directly to the usb interface bypassing the slow Apple Sound Manager. This helps you achieving very little latency values even with USB..... The Roland UA30 isn't shipped with the driver. You have to buy it separately...for $50. Well done Roland, you're smart guys! Egosys makes a similar interface wich is already shipped with the ASIO driver, I had good comments about it, but it's more expensive than the Roland. Luck wanted that I knew via email Markus Medau of Propagamma, the smart guy wich made the usb audio driver. He listened to my problem and gave me a good solution. He recommended to me the Griffin iMic....this sounded funny to me as I thought it was only a toy, Yet he told me that "Sounds as excellent as many other interfaces, even if there might be little worse S/N ratio due to limited possibility to filter the computer's power supply on such a little box. Inside you'll find the same Philips chipset for AD/DA converting that is used by other companies as well."

This was enlightening! Finally, for less than $60, I could get what I wanted....... So I went to the shop and got the iMic, plus a very high quality mini jack to stereo RCA interconnect. I tested the whole thing for a month now, and I have to say that the sound quality is good and I can't complain about anything,I tested it on a A/B comparison against my Marantz cd 6000 cd player, and the difference isn't huge. Sometimes the mac forgets to use the Imic and I have to select it again in the Sound control panel; yet this sounds very a very mild problem compared to the Roland horror stories (especially with VIA equipped PCs). The latency I get with Cubase is 93 msecs wich is high but it can go down to a very low value : the Propagamma driver supports the iMic as well. Cool. I still didn't buy the driver....I 'm waiting for the new 2.0 version:they promise even lower latency:7 msecs!!!!!! This is better than many serious expensive interfaces. Propagamma will build their own usb audio interface, it will have very high end audio quality and interesting features, as Markus confidently told me....the price will be similar to the Roland but you'll get more features and.....their magic drivers as well!

So guys...this is my conclusion: when deciding wich hardware to buy, get something you know is 100% compatible with your mac and your software. Anyhow, I won't forgive Apple for taking away standard audio I/O from the Mac.

Matteo Ionescu Rome, Italy

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Announcement

"The Cube-Zone" launches "The OSX-Zone", its software counterpart. We are looking for benevolent columnists for this new site. Send us an e-mail if you have written articles....

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05/07/01

We don't need PCI slots!

That's what our readers said on last week poll. Maybe Steve Jobs was right about the Cube after all... Here are the results of the poll :

To the question " How many PCI slots do you currently use?", the answers were the following :

This poll shows that when you have a DVD player, an AGP slot and a fast processor, you do not need PCI slots. Firewire and USB are really enough to expand your computer.More than 60% of the people do not use PCI slots. So why is everybody complaining about the lack of expandability of the Cube?

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Rumor : Apple developing its own microprocessors in the near future?

Apple is hiring a Microprocessor Development Project Manager. His job will be to "manage the development of new high-performance microprocessors for future Apple computer products. This person will manage processor co-development and production start-up across processor vendors, Apple VLSI chipset design, and Apple computer system design teams. [...] Requires a minimum of 10 years industry experience including 3 years managing high-performance processor development through production ramp. Experience managing IC development among multiple sites/organizations is preferred. Experience managing IC customer/supplier co-development projects would be beneficial". It seems Apple is trying very hard to deal with the Mhz gap (between Macs and PCs) that currently exists.

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Today on the Forums

05/04/01

USB RAM drives (Part III)

Another of our readers, Paul, sent us some information about a different USB RAM drive. Here is what he says :

"The information you presented on the Q-drive and Trek Thumbdrive are interesting but there is a company making a similar product which has (in my opinion) done everything right. The company is M-Systems. Their web address is: http://www.diskonkey.com.

Their "DiskOnKey" drive not only connects to a powered USB port but it does not require any driver software! This makes it not only a true "plug-and-play" device but also a cross platform drive! Mac users everywhere will be able to quickly and effortlessly exchange information with a PC!

Just thought you'd like to know.

Paul."

• Hardware : iMic and headphones sound really, really bad!
• Hardware : Cube is better value than tower

05/03/01

USB RAM drives (Part II).

Two days ago, we posted the pictures and specs of "Q", a USB RAM hard drive. One of our readers, Alexander, has bought a similar device, the thumbdrive, made by Trek. Here is what he says :

"I saw that [Q drive] on your site today... just thought you should know that a company called Trek has been selling basically the same thing for over a year now.

They just recently released mac OS drivers, so I finally bought one. Trek's version lacks the key ring option and is more square, but they have sizes up to 512MB, with 1GB in the works... plus they cost less... I got my 32Mb drive for $80. All in all, this technology rocks and I think it may very well be the moble storage method of the future.

Alexander"

G4 Cube My Way : new desks posted

We have posted new Cube users' desks. You can take a look at them here.

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05/01/01

New iBook announced with ice-white enclosure.

We know that it is a little bit out of topic, but we wanted to let you know that anew iBook has been announced during the May Day press event. It has an ice-white enclosure. Its weight is 4.9lbs and it is 1.3" thick. (35% thinner than the current iBook). The display is still a 12" display, but the resolution is now 1024x768. The processor is a G3/500. You now have the choice between the following drives : CD-ROM, DVD-ROM, CDRW or a CDRW/DVD combo. The price starts at $1299. For more information check the live coverage of MacAddict

Apple.com down during the night : something big coming?

During the night, Apple's web site went down. What does this mean? Does Steve Jobs plan something bigger than a simple iBook revision? Stay tuned. We'll keep you updated during the day, after the press event.

Update : the Apple Web site is back online. There is no apparent change, but we suspect that something happened during the night.... Is it related with the fact that Apple recently registered the domain name www.ischool.com?

Hardware

Agatech produces a new device, called Q, which may become your storage solution of choice, but is also a nice key ring. Q is a USB storage device. which shows up as another hard drive when plugged into a USB port. According to Agatech, you can run "applications, view videos, or play MP3 files directly from it". Q comes in various storage capacities of 16, 32, and 64mb and uses non-volatile flash memory. The price starts at $69.95

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