APPLE NOTES

Steve Jobs Macworld

Published in SOS September 2002
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Technique : Apple Notes

Photo courtesy of Apple

While Steve Jobs' recent Macworld keynote received a mixed reaction, there were significant demos for musicians.

Steve Jobs' Macworld keynote speeches are always something to look forward to. Even when the rumour sites are pessimistic, there's always the chance the rabbit will be pulled out of the hat in a 'one more thing' moment, and a new Mac will appear to make your credit cards wince. While the rumour sites appeared to be correct for the recent Macworld New York show — on the surface it wasn't one of the most dramatic Apple keynotes I've ever seen — I couldn't help feeling that Jobs had actually demonstrated many technologies that will make this keynote seem significant in retrospect.

Starting with the Mac hardware news, Apple launched a new iMac model featuring a 17-inch flat-panel display. Offering a resolution of 1440x900, which is similar to a conventional 19-inch CRT, the wide-screen ratio makes this display perfect for watching DVDs. For musicians, however, such a display is also great for extra long arrange windows, or simply just fitting arrange and mixer windows on screen simultaneously so they don't overlap.

The new 17-inch iMac, which becomes the new top-end iMac model, has an 800MHz G4 processor and ships with 256MB RAM, an 80GB hard disk, a SuperDrive and the nVidia GeForce 4 MX graphics chipset, unlike the 15-inch iMac models, which all ship with the nVidia GeForce 2 chipset — both chipsets feature 32MB DDR memory. See SOS's review of the original 15-inch iMac in the May 2002 issue for more information about the general specifications of these highly desirable machines. In the US, the 17-inch iMacs costs $1999, which translates to £1649 in UK. Apple have also lowered the price of the 15-inch SuperDrive iMac back to its original retail price: $1799 (£1499).

Also as expected, August 24th was announced as the release for Jaguar, the affectionate codename Apple are sticking with for the release of Mac OS 10.2. In his usual keynote role, playing Robin to Jobs' Batman, Apple VP of Worldwide Marketing Phil Schiller demonstrated some new features in Jaguar's Finder. Spring-loaded folders are back, there's a nice (but ultimately pointless) facility to turn your desktop picture into a dynamic slide show, but perhaps best of all, every Finder window now has a search filter, allowing you to easily find files by typing a short text string.

The Jaguar packaging retains the striking 'leopard skin' look (Jobs: "Pixar rendered the fur, by the way"), although most Mac users will probably find Jaguar's retail price more striking at $129 (£99). If you buy a Mac before August 24th, you can upgrade for just $19.95, but there are no discounts for existing Mac OS X users, which has upset many long-time supporters of OS X. While Apple do of course include a generous software collection, especially considering all the 'free' i-Applications, you don't actually get a choice whether you want them or not! Mac-based musicians who are relying on Jaguar for improvements allowing major MIDI + Audio applications to run may also be annoyed at having to spend more money just to get their existing software to work.

The only other hardware-related news was a revamp in the iPod product line with the introduction of a 20GB model. This has the positive effect of reducing the cost of the 5 and 10 GB models to $299 (£259) and $399 (£329) respectively, while the 20GB version will retail at $499 (£399). The lower cost of the 5GB iPod, coupled with Apple partnering with Musicmatch (www.musicmatch.com) to produce a Windows-compatible version (which is useful for cross-platform users), should help Apple to boost sales as such devices become ever more popular.

The 20GB iPod will provide more capacity to musicians who like to carry around working or finished mixes at full bandwidth (as discussed back in January 2002's Apple Notes), although the 5 and 10GB are still very tempting for this purpose. I'm still trying to find reasons not to buy a 5GB, or even 10GB model at the new price points! With full bandwidth audio, the 5GB offers over eight hours of playback (stereo, 16-bit 44.1kHz), with the 10 and 20GB models obviously offering around 16 and 33 hours respectively.

In addition to new iPods, Jobs also unveiled iTunes 3, the latest update to Apple's popular music player, which now also offers support for spoken word material via audible.com. A new Sound Check effect, also available on the updated iPod software, enables all your music to be played back at a constant level, and Jobs was visibly excited by a new type of playlist: "This is huge... What are those play lists in purple on the top?" The new Smart Playlists are created and managed dynamically, based on conditions you can specify. For example, you could create a Smart Playlist for all your first mixes and the playlist would be automatically updated as you add new first mixes.

A few days before the keynote, Apple had released the final version of QuickTime 6 (a preview version had previously been available), which now offers support for the MPEG-4 video and AAC audio codecs. MPEG-4 aims to deliver DVD-quality video at lower data rates, and the audio side of the MPEG-4 standard, AAC (Advanced Audio Coding) is the next step from the MP3 format. In listening tests, music encoded with AAC at a 96kbps "generally exceeded" the quality of music encoded with MP3 at 128kbps, and AAC at 128kbps offers "significantly superior performance" to MP3 at 128kbps.

Both of these codecs were demonstrated by switching between compressed and uncompressed media as a song, and later a video, was playing. Although a Macworld is hardly ideal test conditions, there's no doubt that these offer significant improvements over existing video and audio codecs. Anything that enables higher quality music to be distributed using less bandwidth is certainly going to be advantageous to 'net-based musicians.

The most significant demo during the keynote for me was of a new networking-related technology in Jaguar called Rendezvous. In a sense, Rendezvous brings the plug-and-play nature of USB and FireWire devices to standard computer networks, whether connected via these interfaces or Ethernet, AirPort or Bluetooth. Using Rendezvous, a network can now be established and configured on the fly, without the user having to worry about IP addresses or any other settings.

During the keynote, there were three demonstrations of Rendezvous in action, including, firstly, connecting a printer over Ethernet and having Rendezvous automatically set it up as a network printer. The second demonstration involved building a 'buddy list' in Jaguar's iChat (instant messaging software) based on anyone who might be nearby with an AirPort-equipped laptop. But it was the third demo that captured my imagination.

Jobs was running a copy of iTunes on his main demo Mac that featured some experimental functionality due for release next year. When Schiller opened his PowerBook on stage, Job's Mac automatically picked up an extra source in the iTunes window for viewing Schiller's library and playlists. Job's was then able to play files from the PowerBook as if they were stored locally, making the whole user experience completely transparent.

So what was most incredible about this? To begin with, Rendezvous had recognised another iTunes device and imported the list of songs from the PowerBook to the Mac. When Jobs started playing a song from Schiller's playlist, the audio file wasn't copied to the Mac — the audio was streamed in real-time over the network. However, the most incredible aspect to this was that the PowerBook was wirelessly networked to the Mac (on the fly thanks to Rendezvous) via AirPort.

While Jobs said such a facility would be great in a house with several computers, he also mentioned that this was only the beginning for potential applications of this technology. And it doesn't take much of a leap to get from streaming audio via Macs running iTunes, to streaming audio via Macs running, say, Logic. In this month's Cutting Edge column, Dave Shapton talks about streaming audio over networks and how the studio of the future could be based around auto-configuring network devices. Well, it turns out that Apple may have started the ball rolling for the mass adoption of this type of technology.

For a computer company that spent so long being proprietary, Apple is now embracing open standards and even setting its own. Rendezvous is a completely open technology and Jobs was keen to point out that "nobody owns Rendezvous", meaning that any company could come up with Rendezvous-compatible devices that could automatically configure themselves on a network.

M Audio have already previewed Bluetooth wireless MIDI adaptors, so how long before solutions are found for all audio and MIDI devices so we have a completely wireless studio that's configured simply by switching on your Mac? Imagine a musician bringing their keyboard into your studio, switching it on, and it automatically showing up on your sequencer. Something that seemed like science fiction yesterday could become a reality by this time next year.

MOTU On X     Mark Of The Unicorn announced the much-anticipated OS X version of Digital Performer on the same day as Steve Jobs' Macworld New York keynote speech. Although exact details have yet to be released, MOTU expect Digital Performer for OS X "to ship during the second half of 2002". However, Performer isn't the only MOTU software coming to OS X, and a public beta of Clockworks for OS X is now available from www.motu.com/english/download. OS X MIDI drivers for MOTU's range of MIDI interfaces have been available for some time, but with the Clockworks control panel software, users can now access all the programmable features of MOTU's rack mount USB interfaces. These announcements mean that Digidesign are now the only other major audio developer on the Mac platform who have yet to make an official announcement regarding OS X compatability. Paul Wiffen

Using Emagic's EMI2/6 with OS X     As reported last month, Emagic have posted OS X drivers for their EMI2|6 USB audio interface at www.emagic.com. Included in the download is an automatic firmware update, which transfers software from your Mac to the EMI2|6 when you reboot the computer. The new firmware enables OS X's built-in USB audio driver to access the unit, and all configuration aspects are dealt with in the System Preferences Sound control panel. In OS 10.1, the Sound control panel only allows Sound Output to be selected and changed, and only the output of the computer can currently be routed through the EMI2|6 (using the first two outputs only) at a system-wide level. Once Jaguar is available, though, you'll be able to select any of the unit's outputs for playback, and also select the EMI2|6's inputs for recording. However, all audio applications that support Mac OS X's Core Audio architecture are immediately able to output through all six channels at up to 24-bit/48kHz quality via their own channel assignment and sample-rate selection parameters. This makes the EMI2|6 as useful for surround sound output under OS 10.1 as it has been for some time under OS 9, and means that Emagic have now broken M Audio's monopoly on OS X-compatible audio devices. Paul Wiffen