Dorchester — May 13th 2014
Trevor gave an account of Audacity, the freeware sound editing programme. He illustrated this using early vinyl recordings of New Orleans Jazz, and how Audacity is used to remove faults from old vinyl recordings. Audacity Help is good and a useful guide to how to use the programme. Trevor explained the rather complicated main screen and demonstrated how to remove blank spaces. The Effects menu - Click Removal automatically removes clicks
(scratches) and pops (dust) from the recording. It is important to clean the vinyl record first with an antistatic cleaner. Noise Removal is sometimes useful. The recording can then be exported to iTunes, but first one needs to identify and label each track and enter the metadata, simpler to do this in iTunes. AIFF format, although taking a lot of disc space is recommended.
Tom then gave the results of a Sunday Times survey of photo editing apps for the iPad.
Adobe Photoshop Express - powerful but not as free as it appears
Pixar express - great mix of effects and fixes
Snapspeed not as polished as Pixar Express
Adobe Lightroom - free but need Creative Cloud sub (i.e. about £8 / month). Well worth a look.
David then demonstrated how to format a new 1 TB external drive using Disk Utility. First you have to decide on and select the required number of partitions, and then choose formatting options For the Mac these will be GUID partition map, and MacOS Extended journal format
Mick concluded proceedings with ‘Numbers - a brief tutorial’. (Unlike John’s February talk on Numbers, this did involve some Calculations - but members withstood this with fortitude!) Mick showed a film which he had prepared showing how Numbers can be used to record and analyse income and expenditure for a bank account by inserting appropriate formulae. (Although he did not recommend that spreadsheets be used for such important tasks because of the malign impact of human fallibility.) The film which he used for the demo had been prepared using Camtasia for Mac (£70), which allows you to zoom in on different parts of the screen, and so present selected views of the computer screen at an appropriate level of magnification.
SR
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