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I have been experimenting with the new iPad Camera Connection Kit and today I hit the mother load as an audio geek.  I wanted a way to be able to put clean high quality audio into my iPad with more than just a 1/8 inch jack headphone\mic combination. Today I experimented with this by using a Plantronics USB to 1/8 mic input that came with a PLANTRONICS .AUDIO 650 USB  Multimedia Stereo Headset($33.98U.S.). This  USB dongle that comes with the headset is in essence a sound card (like a Griffin iMic) .  I plug this USB \audio converter  into the iPad, and take stereo out of  the Mackie ONYX 1220 mixers main outputs and turn on the Bias iProRecorder app for iPhone on the iPad.

Much to my surprise, I’m able to record out of the Mackie board with very high quality (please listen to the audio on this post). There fore able to use the iPad as a full on digital recorder. This is huge as if I use something like the Griffin iMic (or potentially another USB sound card, I can use the iPad as my recorder in the field etc. I did not alter the sound in any way (you will hear some hiss) and I did convert the 44.1Khz WAV recording to mp3. This alone makes the iPad Camera Connection Kit worth the price $29 U.S., and it keeps reminding me that when Apple says the iPad is Magic… well there maybe something to that.

Update: I also tried to plug in a Blue Snow Flake and a Samsom COU1 USB mic, using another iPad audio application. Both worked perfectly well. Sounds like this is baked in. I can’t tell you if it’s on purpose or not.

IPad being used as a digital interface with the iPad Camera connector Kit

I have been waiting for the iPad Camera Connection Kit to arrive, since one of the main things I want to use my iPad for is to view pictures and store pictures in the field.  Here are a few thought and tests on this addition to my iPad.

• iPad Camera Connection Kit had no trouble recognizing the Canon G11 RAW or JPG file formats. As soon as I plugged in the card, I was prompted by the iPad to select “all” or simply select which pictures I wanted to upload.
• iPad Camera Connection Kit recognized the Nikon D700 USB connection ,and had no trouble uploading NEF (Nikon RAW) files. These files were instantly available for me to view on the iPad.
• Once I plugged the iPad to iTunes, the pictures transferred to iPhoto in the format (RAW or JPG) which I had originally used. Since I’m not an iPhoto user I wish I could choose Light Room as a place to upload the photos. Currently the choice in the photo tab of the iPad are, iMovie, Aperture, or the Picture folder.  However using Phone View from eCamm.com I found that I could navigate to the Disk/DCIM folder on the iPad and I could see the 100IMPRT folder where the RAW files are stored. at that point I could have just copied these into a local directory and then to  Adobe Light Room.
• At the suggestion of @fishbones on Twitter, I tried to see if I could plug my Sandisk Extreme USB 2.0 3in1 Card Reader . When I did this the iPad did see the photos, but when I tried to upload the photos to the iPad it gave me the following error. “Accessory Unavailable The attached accessory uses too much power”. My conclusion is that even though this card reader did not work, others may . 
  
• I also tried to upload some video from an SD card that had been used by my Canon HFS100 video camera. Again the iPad did not like this device and gave the “This accessory is not supported by the iPpad.” I would imagine that some developers may be able to tap into this hardware with independent apps in the future.
• I attached a USB drive formatted both in FAT and OSX formats. The iPad Camera Connection Kit did not recognize the format. In the card I had a Pages document, a Keynote Document and a PDF.
• Twitter follower @tchaten wanted me to see if it would recognize audio files in an SD card. It did not, but I suspect that applications may be able to make this function in the future.
• Of course I tried to plug this into the iPhone 3gs and it gave the error “This accessory is not supported by the iPhone.”

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Today George Starcher and I talk deeply and for more than an hour about OS X, Neworking, Wireless networks and we also review the PogoPlug, PogoSketch as well as the HyperMac Mini and HyperMac Nano

Tonight’s show is brought to you by:

SmileOnMyMac and Drobo

TMUP Drobo Deals

Help Victor and the show by purchasing items at the Typical Mac User Amazon Store

Show Notes

IEEE 802.11 G

IEEE 802.11 N

Airport Extreme

Airport Express

Linksys WRT54G

WPA

WEP

Panasonic HD-PLC Ethernet Adaptor Starter Pack

HyperMac Mini

HyperMac Nano

PogoSketch

PogoPlug

It’s no secret if you are a listener or reader of my blog or Twitter that I am a crazy person when it come to storage, back ups etc. One of my routines is to mark any new hard drives that I buy with the date of purchase (using a black marker). I do this because depending on the drive .I know that they tend to go bad in three to five years.

I’ve had my MacPro since March of 2007 ,and soon after I bought that MacPro I got three hard drives to fill up all four drive bays. I had set a calendar reminder on the day that I bought them to remind me in three years to check if those drives were still good. That reminder came up last Friday.

Well I had not replaced any of the three drives , so I used this neat utility called SMART Utility by Volitans Software. The software was $25 and I downloaded the trial version which lets you open the application a total of four (4) times before having to buy it.

The first time I opened this software it told me that all three of  the aforementioned hard drives were “failing.” Now, can I be 100% sure they were going to fail today, or next month? No, but that is all I needed to see. You see, even though 100% of the data on these three drives is backed up in at least two other places, I don’t like downtime. I hate downtime.

So I immediately opened up SMART Utility and paid the $25.00 to the developer. Why? Well it’s the right thing to do. This developer just saved me at least four hours of downtime, countless frustration and me having to tweet about how sad I was because my hard drives failed.

Next step, I already had a 150GB Western Digital Velociraptor in a drawer (drive one), and I bought two Western Digital Caviar Black 1 TB  Hard Drive 3.5 Inch, with 32 MB Cache (drives two and three). As you read this I’m in the process of cloning the MacPro drives to the new ones. I also just marked today’s date (Using a black marker) on them. Lastly, I set up a calendar date of 4/19/2013 reminding me to check if my drives are still good. Sure they will likely be in a replacement computer by then, but an once of prevention goes a long way to saving frustration when it comes to hard drive failure.

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We continue our Snow Leopard from scratch series. Today we talk about parental controls

Tonight’s show is brought to you by:

SmileOnMyMac and Drobo

Help Victor and the show by purchasing items at the Typical Mac User Amazon Store

This show is a member of Friends In Tech

Show Notes:

Apple’s Parental Controls video

In my anxiousness to get my iPad grew, I bought the iPad version of this great application right away.

Since then, I found out that I did not need to do that. So, please read this article from Agile Software that explains it all. I’m sure the application will rock, as all products by Agile generally do.

I don’t blame Agile, but I would hate to see you spend extra cash. If you also bought both versions, Contact app store support for a refund.