Dorchester — Jul 15th 2009

The meeting was opened by John, with 18 members present.

David gave a very interesting presentation which explained how he used Sound Studio and iTunes to produce a regular audio magazine programme on CD for blind people in the area. He introduced this with some historical recollections of how sound recording had been used 'in the field' by the BBC since the days of WWII, using wire recorders, reel-to-reel tape, and more recently, tape cassette. We were shown how music and speech were combined to form the programme, and how the results were burned to CD using Toast. We then learned how a similar approach could be used to transfer music from vinyl to CD, and that Audacity could be used in place of Sound Studio, at the cost of a degree of complexity.

Mark then introduced his O2 broadband dongle, which, at modest cost, will enable our meetings, which are currently in a broadband free zone, to link up to the Internet. There are some points to note when setting up a computer to use this, either by sharing an internet connection with the computer on which the dongle is installed, or, alternatively, in setting up the computer to use the dongle directly. I hope and request that those who are privy to such mysteries will share this knowledge with others by commenting on this blog entry.

Proceedings were concluded (after the interval, in which the alcohol non-free zone capabilities of our venue were exploited) by a demonstration, by Doug, of iFamily for Leopard, a genealogy programme for the Mac. He used this to replace an OS 8/9 version of Reunion, whose cost seemed to be escalating rapidly, and found that iFamily, at a much more modest cost, was entirely adequate for what he needed to support his Family Research. Another possible contender was Mac Family Tree, which he showed briefly, but had not investigated in detail.

JSR

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