Thursday, January 21, 2016

Its been almost a full year of absolutely nothing to really speak of. Yes there has been the multiple purchases and returns of the Apple watch - and the Surface 4 Pro  til I finally settled on the Surface 3, and the Microsoft Band 2, Lumina 640 XL and iPhone 6+.

But I am not here to speak of those, instead I want to talk about my old 2006 Mac mini - Intel Duo Core 1.66 GHz, 2 GB memory and the 350 GB HDD that I apparently installed but I sincerely can not remember doing so... initially it only came with 60 GB as per Apple's information page : Mac mini (Late 2006) - I must have done it.  And as I write this I vaguely remember the internals of the machine so ... well there it is.



Anyway what I want to blab on about is how limiting  new technology has become. - out of the box wise.

My new (yeah I forgot to mention) Retina 13" MacBook Pro - will not recognise a 3.5 input jack unless its the three groove kind and only want either lightening or usb (same with my iMac) - but I can't find the cable that I want to finish the job that I started and won't waste my time or money looking for one.


All I want to do is record what I can hear on my PC - or Mac for that matter. My fairly new AIO PC has a very limited sound card, very intentional of course BUT does have a dedicated line in and headphone jack of the two groove variety.  That's a start.

But as I can't record anything that I hear except through the internal mic I have to find an alternative. Hence I dust off my old Mac mini.

It has a dedicated input jack ! It accepts two groove 3.5 jack ! I can still get legacy software for Snow Leopard ( Mac OS X V. 10.6) and voila I can record but passing my output via headphone jack to my Mac using the input and capturing using lovey Audacity.

Now I record what I want, save it in .aiff move it to my newer iMac (late 2012) and convert it using a free MP3 converter called " To MP3 converter Free " (you can find it in the Mac App store).

Now I am happy once more. I am recording hours of music from Groove and archiving it for future enjoyment in my vehicle or on my phone when I don't have a data connection - I am on a economy carrier network - Happy once again :)