[OT] Music CDs

Only as a result of using the cheapest components or mismatching software to hardware.

Otherwise that doesn't make sense.

The speed with which IBM commissioned the original PC meant that it consisted of components bought in from outside manufactures, components which could be purchased by anyone. Clone ,manufacturers or hobbyists

Among these components manufacturers there would always be some whose products proved more reliable than others.

Once Compaq had reverse engineered the ROM and Gates put PCDos on the market there was nothing to stop anyone manufacturer or hobbyist from assembling a super reliable machine from the range of components which became available. Or again a pile of junk from the cheapest components.

But all at a far lower cost than Apple

Apple on the other hand, built their machines using custom components and technologies running dedicated software based on sales to a much smaller user base than PC's.

All of which made their machines that much more expensive.

michael adams

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I'm not aware of the "Blue Screen of Death" on Macs and that was around with XP.

Maybe but with a reasoble bright light and a decent phone might be good enough but perhaps not.

So it's like ancient parchment, needs to be intact. I guess I'd through the old ablum and just keep the pictures but maybe the actual album should be kept intack as opart of it.

I think with the age of smartphone the use of such a feature isn;t that great.

I remebr them we thought about getting one hear along with a portable coule injet printer you could have a laptop printer and scanner all in one bag to take anywhere.... but someone asked why considering the cost, so only one reaserch group brought the set up.

I;ll ask on a photo group .....

That's is a reason PCs were and are cheaper, and peolpe like cheap when they don't know what else is on offer or how it might be better.

But not so much with apple who made sure products sold for it had a great chance of working without the errors the software could introduce. It either worked on a Mac or didn't, if it didnlt it wasn' adversised for Mac. This was all before USB which doid help a lot.

It was the mixing of the 2 that caused problems and does for any product.

Yes like any product, but sometimes there;s a disadvantage to lower costs. I can cook a 3 course meal cheaper than a high end resturant btu it won't be the same experience but both might get the job done of yuo filling full rather than hungry.

Which meant they had more control and hence more relible.

But also worht more, check out the second hand prices on ebay a 8 year old mac laptop will cost more than most 3 year-old PC laptop, why because they are worth more and so peole are more willing to spend more on them.

Of course PC's laptops catch up they now have them avaible in something other than cheap breakable plastic. I have a 2015 Dell laptop to repair, the charging socket isn't connecting. The last time I came across that was with a Mac 5300C that was 9 years old a lecturer wanted to hand it over to his daughter and the ONLY thinmg wrong was it wasnlt charging, I coudl actually take it apart and repair it, can't seem to get this dell apart safely.

But yuo should ask yourself why people spend more on Aple laptops than they need to, as PC laptops are avaiible but Apple ones still sell.

Plenty of flatbed scanners could do that, but it helps if the photos can be removed from the album. Do they have those gummed corner attachments or have they been glued into the album ?.

But the result is the same an old scanner on a new PC with new software, perhaps you could buy an old PC with old software to run it. When I wanted to play an old game or tow starcraft for one, it won't run on my new iMac neither will simcity 2000 my two favouite games from nearly 20 years ago, there;s no starcraft and the new simcities I just don't like.

So my only option is getting in the loft and dragging out my old G3 CRT 300 MHz iMac.

Maybe that's a good place for the scanner, Or the antiques road show ;-P

- That's is a reason PCs were and are cheaper,

With PC's there's always been a wide choice of components and they can be selected to be as reliable as the buyer or assembler chooses. But still cheaper than Apple.

Same as software. At the start Apple had a monopoly with the Adobe licensed Postscript interpreter and Type 1 fonts running on the Apple Laserwriter using the Canon CX engine. As soon as Bill came out with a cloned Postscript interpreter, along with an alternative in True Type fonts the prepress and DTP market, formerly an Apple monopoly was busted wide open. Even now I've still got a Postscript cartridge that would plug into a HP lasersjet with the same Canon CX engine at a fraction of the cost of the equivalent Laserwriter.

Whether they like it or not Apple users are spoon fed dedicated Apple software which will only run on proprietary Apple hardware thus making it more difficult if not impossible, even for people of more limited ability, to screw up.

But again as I went on to point out, that all costs money.

michael adams

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but most choose the cheapest.

No more expensive in most cases, it;s been proved many times. So go ahead and prove it. A friend tried he bpught an equalalant to a mac laptop for £300 a few years ago. One using it he found he couldn;t read the screen at more than one precide angle of view. Yes he thought that the number of gigahertz and getting a laptop with twice the size HD and more memory means he was buying better computer than the macbook that was £1,200. So it stayed in his draw for 3 years virtually unsused but for email and youtube which froze every so often.

'cloned' you mean copied.

Bill is here at the moment come to think of it.

But aple still thrived why was that then if PCs were better and or cheaper ?

So what.

Total crap you don't know what you are talking about. Microsoft wrote the WYSISYG first on the Apple mac NOT the PC. Why did they do that.

As do most things, some of us think some things are worth paying for or paying more for.

In message snipped-for-privacy@googlegroups.com, whisky-dave snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com writes

If that's me you are talking about, yes I am. But you are missing my main point.

Because PC's don't proscribe the hardware and software, they are inherently more versatile. I've been involved in audio (recording and playback, not sound synthesis) on personal computers since the late '80's, and actively installed audio systems commercially from 1994 based initially on Windows 3.1.

I think ProTools may have been there in the mid 90's, but it was at that time just a Mac driving hugely expensive external hardware. It was certainly PC's that led the way, with DOS based cards at first, then decent ISA-bus cards. Soundblaster was common around then, but mediocre in the extreme, not being full duplex, and relying on the advertising hype that gave it a bad name.

Good cards in 1995 ran on PC's and, in conjunction with a handful of good programs (eg Cool Edit), offered better handling of the maths involved in mixing audio than many of the professional systems, many of which were used in studios where they would mixdown to tape using analogue mixers, partly because of the poor performance of some of the pro software.

Many of the ground-breaking audio card manufacturers have disappeared, but I still have here the GadgetLabs card that did 4-track recording and the MediaMagic card that did hardware or software .mp2 encoding. Turtle Beach was the manufacturer that we mainly used, and I think they have now dropped out of the business. None of these soundcards was very expensive, but there was nothing low quality about them.

I remember seeing an Apple II at a local college and admiring its construction in the days I was still into Veroboard in places inside the box, but it didn't do audio at a price I could afford.

My first pro audio on a laptop recording was in 1996, using a Fujitsu laptop that just did mono. The "piece" was topped and tailed, edited and broadcast within minutes of the event. "Real" Acer (ex TI) laptops and IBM Thinkpads had good internal audio in those days.

I have nothing against Apple, and family and friends use their products, but they do restrict what you can do with them. I do appreciate that times have moved on, and there is now software and hardware that runs on Macs, but I do know these local one-man studios producing and selling recordings, all done on PC's. One of them got an old PC from me last year on Freecycle, and demonstrated his studio, and several of the tracks, in return for free delivery.

The photos are fixed into the albums in various ways, including glue and corner pieces. The albums themselves have mainly brown thick paper pages, some of which are turning to dust at the edges. The bindings are not in good condition.

A search has found that HP used to make a couple of see through scanners, but they are discontinued. Many posts begging HP to produce a current similar model. There is a thing called a Doxie Flip, which apparently has drivers only for Mac, but will scan to its memory card.

I think I'll stick with my Petiscan as it does work with my virtual W98, and it is nice and neat.

In message snipped-for-privacy@googlegroups.com, whisky-dave snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com writes

A friend with a motor caravan had a scanner and portable printer. Apparently it was invaluable for producing documentation when travelling between various former soviet countries.

I used to dual-boot Linux (Slackware) and NT4 without a problem (apart from a serious lack of disk space). I think it may have been something you told it to do that caused your problems, rather than an inherent fault (unless you consider a strict lack of hand-holding, and less of the "are you really really sure you want to do that?", an inherent fault).

Most half decent phone cameras should be more than adequate for that sort of thing.

Mine is about 5 years old - a Galaxy - and I expect they've improved since then.

Apple products certainly don't have a good reputation for long life. But then those who adore them are happy to buy a new one every couple of years, so I doubt it matters much.

No I wasn;t tlking about you I was talking aboaut bill gates who was at my uni on that day.

whatevers meant by that.

So.

I've no idea what DOS based cards is meant to mean.

and on the mac , I have somewhere a hammerfall card 24 bit IIRC for Mac. I don't know too much about it as it;'s not mine.

Niether could PCs at the time. Otherwise why would Brian Eno have developed the startups sound of windows on a Mac.

Really, not what I heard and when comnparing them with Macs.

I go to quite a few gigs for live music and tha majoroty of the labtops you see on stage are Apple laptops.

In what way ?

It always has done, the Apple II WAS NOT a Mac.

It not that difficult nower days on any system.

That's total rubbish, you can tell by the prices of second hand Apple products on ebay.

Ah - right. How you judge things. ;-)

How else to you tell what something is worth unless you know how much someone ELSE thinks it's worth.

That's why few tubes trains travel to sarf London. ;-P