miamizsun,  Did you consider moving to a Linux or other Unix-based operating system?   

 ScottFromWyoming wrote:
other half has been mac os for a decade
i'm truly in awe of the m1 chip efficiency on the mac mini
bench testing confirms that it literally crushes the competition 
m2 is here and m3 chips are in the works

microsoft has been working on similar chip architecture, volterra
it may take a couple of years to catch up tho


 

 miamizsun wrote:

The only part of this I would be able to contribute to is the CD ripping. No Apple devices have CD burners anymore, but a SuperDrive is $79. iTunes (now "Music") will rip the CDs just fine and once you do, you can upload the CD info to CDDB and when someone inserts your burnt CD into their machine, it will "know" what the songs are. Sweet deal.

 miamizsun wrote:

Well I’m taking it that you are dipping your toes into Apples operating systems? 
iOS, iPhones and iPad then adding Mac OSX desktop computing as you go along. FYI Apple is on the verge of releasing an operating system that will combine them both into one OS to make it easier between the hardware types.

There are many software App types for Apple to make it easier to work in conjunction with MS & Linux operating systems to create readable cross platforms disks. Apple has always been a friendly way to create and read from most platforms.

As for hardware products there are a lot of good refurbished previous version products through Apple store and other 2nd party providers that can cut your costs. Look up a guy on YouTube named Luke Miani who does a lot of useful comparison of Mac products and cheaper ways to buy.

Personally I never buy current hardware products, outside of my iPad Air 4, to cut costs. I’ve got an iPhone XR and will probably do an upgrade to an iPhone 13  in December since the 14’s have no real difference between them outside of a slight speed boost which isn’t worth the extra $100 for me and I don’t really have the need for the Pro versions. 

Good luck in the transition.

 miamizsun wrote:


VERY hard to tell from the info you provided in your post.
Depending on your future Mac hw-setup, you could still be using all Windows related, urgently needed M$-things in a VM, such as VirtualBox (Oracle). That said, go for as much RAM as possilble, coupled with CPU & GPU power, preferably AMD when it comes to graphics...
When it comes to ripping CDs and your personal music library, I've been using MacOS over ten years now without a single regret. The former iTunes app, now named as Music allows for all of that.
Coming from Windows it may take some re-learning how to do things there, but I can say it generally 'just works' on MacOS, and forget all your pains of endless waiting times during updates you got used to, as a Windows user. - Etc., etc.

If you have any specific questions to ask, you're more than welcome to PM me.

legit inquiry and responses welcome

i'm considering moving over to IOS for personal use to start
one concern i have here is my cd ripping/burning/cd cover production ability
currently i use nero, however they don't seem to have an IOS version
practically all of my work stuff is asp-stateful/cloud/web-based (or going there)
got an iphone now and i'd probably start with a mac mini

fwiw, i use industrial/pro windows and MS365 at the office (for security and encryption)
i noticed the powers that be are allowing and working with IOS too
so eventually i might be open to using a mac at work

pros? cons?

thanks 

Just sharing my recent experience and discoveries as I recover from the crash of my 10 year old Dell Windows 7 puter.

So I went and got a new Dell XPS 8940 with Windows 11 pro with an optical drive. The choices are very few when an optical drive is needed.  And when you are desperate to replace something quickly and you are not up to date on changes and advances you can make poor decisions.  One thing I learned by accident after I bought it is that the power supplies are bigger when you get one with an HDD instead of a SSD.  Fortunately I picked one with an HDD because Dell's are evidently just powered enough for their initial setups and should you add another HDD to an underpowered Dell, you end up with failures and continuous restarts which I have heard about over time but not knowing why, cuz I didn't have to until now.

Anyway, long ago someone gave me a hard drive dock, without a power supply and I could never find one for it, so meh.  I've gone through external cases for old drives and what not back when a 100 GB drive was a big deal.  They worked at the time and I have about 4 laying around taking up space.  So with this crash I figured that it was time to get a working one to help recover data and move it to the new puter.  Fortunately I have a brick and mortar Microcenter about a half an hour away and went looking around at their website and found a dock that also clones SATA drives with just the push of one button.  Hello !!!!  Going into the store at the front where the repair service is I saw that they charged $149 for cloning.  This puppy is $70.

As we all know, you no longer get discs to reload for reimaging purpose and you have to do a rinky dink download on a USB flash drive and hope number one it works and number two, you can find it when you need it.  The wife's Windows 10 went down and the flash drive back up did not work.  Fortunately with partitioning, the data was recoverable, so I took it in to a local place and had them put a new copy of 10 in and all the drivers on a SSD and got her back up and running with mostly just inconvenience. 

Long ago with my old XP Sony Vaio which still sits between the new one and my XP music puter, I went and made a preloaded HDD with the OS on it  for backup to toss in in the event of a failure which I did have to a couple of times.  OK, so with a dock that clones, I got a new SSD to clone the original HDD with the OS on it and have the original HDD sitting in a bay inside the computer disconnected as my "backup copy".  The clone worked first time I tried it, making sure that I had it plugged into the motherboard in the same place as the original OS C drive.    This changes everything !!!   

I tossed in a 4 TB drive in the main 3.5 inch bay for everything else leaving the OS disc with just that on it so I won't loose anything the next time I have a failure.  This will also be a transfer point from my music puter to the NAS that has been sitting unused because it doesn't work with XP very well.  Now I can program things for auto back up and actually use the damn thing rather than just taking up space and collecting dust.  Another win / win.

I started replacing the drives in the music puter about a month or so ago that were getting nearly 10 years old and was also thinking that it was time to make a new copy of the OS drive which has been an SSD for almost as long.  This just makes everything so much easier now.  Now I can just clone it myself rather than pulling out all of the discs and going through that process.

So this is the puppy that changed everything and the cost is nothing in the big picture ...

Vantec NexStar Standalone Hard Drive Duplicator

When I get caught up I think I'll yank the OS drive out of the Vaio, clone it to SSD and fire it up and see what happens.

Cheers!

 westslope wrote:

Sure, but my laptop ist kaput and so I was working with an old iMac that's slow and doesn't have all the software. It has iMovie but meh, wasn't worth the trouble. This website adds titles and music and lets you snip segments and was really just what I needed. Except for adjusting the speed of the clip...

 ScottFromWyoming wrote:
I do not know the MacOS world well at all.......

Could you have not taken the video, transferred the image file to your Mac and then directly edited it?  

 kurtster wrote: 
i always thought real player sounded great
seems i remember it being very aggressive tho

 kcar wrote: 
I still use Real Player quite a bit to download videos.  Do not use it for anything else. Easiest to use for me.  Then again this computer is a Win 7 PC.

Occasionally I'll pull the audio from music vids using an old version of switchfile on my XP music puter.

 R_P wrote:

I prowled thru "inspect element" for an hour but couldn't locate it. Of course it was right there in the Source but that is always the harder option. Usually.

So in searching the source for MP4, I found this
https://d2m23yiuv18ohn.cloudfront.net/Video/SDt7jOwYZ44OjbELqMH0Dg/336886919_360x360_F15.mp4 which is correct except for the backslashes. Deleted those and got the file.

Oh, and holy crap. Inspect, search mp4, it's right there. Man, I was punchy last night. The interesting thing to me is that I usually go to the "sources" tab and look for photos I need, that usually is less of a needle in a haystack when there's a lot of images on a page. Not this time!

 kcar wrote:

I tried a couple of screen capture tools but it wanted to use the microphone audio and not the video audio. Probably a workaround for that.

 ScottFromWyoming wrote:
Happy to help.

Now to teach you to fish... You can right-click (Apple command-click?) on the embedded video and choose Inspect Element or View Source. You will see it uses an HTML Video tag. The Video tag itself has an attribute called SRC (source file for the video) which is the URL I posted as a link.

 ScottFromWyoming wrote:

Real Player...talk about back in the day...

Could you use QuickTime to do a video screen capture? I've done that before and you don't even have to record the whole screen. I think you can save the video capture to different file formats. IIRC VLC will do the same. 

 kurtster wrote:

Really? Must be disabled on Mac Ah I was trying to use VLC. I still think I should have been able to get it somehow; was even prowling thru the source files but struck out and it was like 1 a.m.

THANK YOU for doing that. Yeah it became one of those projects that the parents do the heavy lifting on; Charlie's been down with a cold since Friday. I went to Walmart yesterday and got a covid test to make sure he could go back to class but he's still under the covers.

 ScottFromWyoming wrote: 
FWIW, I was able to download it with Real Player.  I put it up but took it down when I saw Richard had already done it.

 westslope wrote:

I should have documented the setup: my phone on the shelf that sits over the stovetop, with a can of tomatoes weighing it down. Aimed all the track lights on that spot to try to knock down shadows and it sort of worked.

That Animoto site is pretty cool. If I were doing these for a blog etc. I would consider paying for it. I think the pro version gives you some control over dissolves etc. I did one segment (chopping strawberries) using the time-lapse function on the phone, but the other time-lapse bits in there, I did a screen recording using the MacOS, start playing the regular speed video, then used the slider to "scrub" it at about 2x speed. Then I uploaded the screen grab rather than the original video. Music is stock.

 R_P wrote:

THANK YOU
They don't tell you until you're done that you can't download it...

 ScottFromWyoming wrote:

How did the video get made?  Camera?  Smartphone?