Record Vinyl on Your Mac

In this age of Spotify streaming and mp3s and flacs, only a true luddite would have CDs still burning the midnight laser. So what does that say for people who have vinyl? I probably have to trot out words like Mezozoic or Paleozoic to describe you freaks of nature. Luckily there are ways to bring you into the modern age and digitize your old record collection so you can play them on your iPods, iPhones, and iClouds.

There are several ways to go about this. You could get a USB turntable to hook up to your Mac, but their quality can be dodgy. You can get an iMic, made for laptops with no microphone-in jack, and use it in conjunction with Final Vinyl, but you're not likely to get the best sound quality out of that method either. If you have RCA cables, you could get an RCA to USB adapter, or probably best of all, you could get a PCI card with RCA jacks for analog I/O. As far as software goes, in addition to the above mentioned Final Vinyl, there's also Audacity which is a great freeware solution, and there's also Roxio's CD Spin Doctor which requires Toast.

But if you're like me, you don't do any of that. Because if you're like me, you have a spare Power Mac 7600 in your closet with built-in RCA ports that you can fire up to bring back a whiff of the good old days when hearts were young, skies were blue, and your Mac greeted you with a smiley face. All of which brings me to talking about probably my favorite utility ever made for the Mac. It's called Coaster and, though purely a Mac program, it exemplifies that old Unix credo, "one thing well." Simply put, it records audio to disk as aiff files. And it's intuitive enough to split tracks into separate files. It runs exclusively on Mac OS 8-9 and is as good an excuse as any to make that old Power Mac useful and rip your ancient vinyl collection that's been gathering dust. And for symmetry's sake, a 7500 or 7600 can probably be found for about the same price as a PCI card.

The only downside to all of this is there's no way around the having-to-play-it-to-record-it problem, so if you're ripping a large collection, bring snacks.

Essential Additions To Your Mac OS 9 Default Install

When you install OS 9, it comes with many things out of the box, some of which are cool, and some of which are hopelessly outdated like IE 5 and Netscape 4. So I thought I'd compile a short list of additional software that will bring your OS 9 system more up to date in the age of bell bottoms. Bell bottoms--those are a thing now, right?

Anyway, here's the list:

Audion was iTunes before iTunes and in addition to mp3s also plays ogg files. Attractive, non-intrusive interface.

Classilla is a web browser based on Mozilla and still under development. Comes with NoScript built-in and you can set its user agent to a mobile device to have websites default to their mobile sites for speed.

Acuity is a simple rss reader.

FLVPlayer plays flv files saved to disk.

YTBrowser9 plays Youtube on OS 9! The homepage is in Japanese, so check here for english instructions.

Flash 7 is required for YTBrowser9, I believe.

Divx 5.1.1 plays some divx encoded videos, but not all. It's a bit of a crapshoot.

Xvid Delegate Component delegates xvid files to be played with the Divx codec. I've never tried this, but it's worth a shot.

iText is a word processor that saves to rtf and was updated as recently as 2009.

ATI_OS9_RADEON_Update_9_2_2_jan2005 is the final update for ATI drivers and is required for later cards like a Radeon 9000. The link takes you to a thread with download links and more information.

DVD Extractor is needed to mount .toast images.

NetPresenz provides ftp for OS 9, which may be the only networking option with Macs running Lion.

CreaseProof fixes creator code problems that might arise from networking files.

PrinTtoPDF duplicates the built-in function in OS X.

MacPython is an OS 9 development environment for python, so if you want to write your own python scripts, go crazy.

Mini vMac on OS 9 is a bit of nostalgia within nostalgia as it emulates a Macplus.

And Virtual PC is needed for bittorrent because the only bittorrent clients that still work on OS 9 were for Windows:(

And there you have it. With these titles installed, you'll find the OS to be not quite as ancient. In fact, when I boot into OS 9 to do something specific, I find myself lingering. What, with writing and playing my ogg collection and surfing the web, I can go on using OS 9 much like I was using OS X.