What’s happening to the Mac Pro?

November 4th, 2011

I own a Mac Pro, and my brother has been considering getting one for HD video editing of amateur/no-budget movies. The market for the Mac Pro has been shrinking for a while with many people that would have previously chosen a Mac Pro, choosing an iMac or MacBook Pro. The recent rumours of Apple considering ending the product line has given me pause to consider what the future might be for computer users with high needs.

I’ve written a series of articles exploring the future of the Mac Pro. I’ve split it to consider the wider context separately from Apple and the Mac Pro itself. Read the rest of this entry »

MarsEdit

May 23rd, 2011

I’m trying out MarsEdit, after seeing Shawn Blanc’s post ‘An Ode to Software’.

Read the rest of this entry »

The magic of sox

April 18th, 2011

I've been trying to fiddle about with a 6 channel audio track, trying to get a movie soundtrack without the dialogue. The basic principle is that most of the dialogue is in the centre channel, so inverting left and adding that to right strips the dialogue, but keeps the music (and sound effects). I was using audacity, but the size of the files meant it brought my computer to its knees (because of hard drive access and a stupidly large paging file).

After some searching I found vox, which is a command line tool. It's pretty much like piping text from one tool to another, but with audio 😀 yummm!