Bournemouth — Jun 21st 2016

The advent of the holiday season, the unlikely home nation success in the Euros and the irresistable lure of the Great Referendum Debate combined to ensure that only a select group of nine members gathered at Solutions in Bournemouth to hear part two of John Ansell's Sounds of Music talk, this part being subtitled 'A Listening Evolution'. John told the story of the evolution of his hifi system through the ages, starting with a traditional stereo system and music sourced from a turntable or from audio CDs.

2009 saw John experimenting with importing some music from CD into iTunes on his Mac. This could then be played through the hifi controlled by the Front Row app.

Unhappy with the quality of the analogue connection from Mac to hifi, John's next investment was an analogue to digital converter. The converter and a Mac Mini, connected by a USB cable, sat alongside the hifi. A useability limitation of this system was that the TV (acting as the screen for the Mac mini) had to be on in order to use Front Row. This was overcome a year or so later by using the Remote app on an iPad to control the music in iTunes, obviating the need for Front Row.

Later developments included the use of an Airport Express to play music through a second, remote, hifi before John went the whole hog, investing in Sonos digital sound equipment to replace the hifi and running the PLEX media server app on the Mac mini to access his iTunes library. A bonus of this is that the accompanying PLEX app for iOS enables the iTunes music to be played on an iPhone via the Internet, avoiding the need to store a lot of music on the phone itself.

John stressed that the time-consuming job with this evolution was (and still is) that of importing the music collection from CD into the Mac. He now uses an app called Max for the importing because it does better quality checks on the CD data (although iTunes is believed to have subsequently improved somewhat in this aspect). John demonstrated how to select a lossless format for the importing process to ensure the best quality and also showed how to select a less memory-hungry format (e.g. 128kb/s AAC) for tracks stored on iOS devices.

After fielding a few questions, John handed back to Tony who gave a summary of highlights from the recent Apple WWDC, which is a curtain raiser on developments which will be coming in the next Mac OS (designated Sierra) and iOS. Videos of the key features can be found on Apple's website, here:
https://developer.apple.com/videos/wwdc2016/

After a short tea break, the usual Q&A session was held, this time focussing on the Calendars app, including the management of multiple calendars and when it might be better to use the Reminders app instead.

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