USB sticks don't quite do it for you?

It's an interesting question, whether we could do without a disc drive. The only thing I've used ours for in recent years is ripping CDs I've borrowed from the library, or burning discs for friends (where a laying-around-freebie-USB stick could do just fine if they were actually present in my house). Hard to fit cover art on the outside, as € knows, but outside of a mix CD swap party, I don't see it being a problem for me. Everything via email or dropbox or whatever.

Yeah, the only issue I'd have is with "stealing" music from the library, and I could afford to actually buy things, if I had to.

I plan on getting a disc drive for our household Macs eventually, but honestly it hasn't been a problem as I've long ago ripped my CDs, and have dedicated DVD/Bluray devices attached to my TV when I want to use those - but if somethings already available streaming, I'll pick that version out of convenience.

I still have a lot of vinyl that never made it to MP3 format so a USB turntable is also on the list.

I thought I'd need a drive a LOT more than I do. The first couple of months or so was a rush of ripping and archiving but since then I've rarely used it. It felt like it took forever to rip all the DVDs.

I chuckle with CP... I'm a BIG fan of the USB stick in the car. 5.2 days of tunes available without swapping disks? I'm in! It was a little fiddly getting rid of the spotlight search files on the stick, but it works great now.

I just had to look at my computer to confirm it has optical drives it has been so long since I used them.

It has been a couple years since I watched an actual DVD (via TV or computer) so that is out. A dropbox account and my needs for file transfer are met.

I remember how I mocked Apple when they decided they didn't need floppy drives in their computers. But I was wrong. And while there are many people who do have need for optical drives, I think it is probably so low a number at this point that it doesn't make sense to make everybody buy one just so they have them.

I've now maxed out my nice-things-to-say-about-Apple quota for the year.

I'm addicted to my optical drive. Those who know me, know I'm a mad music mixer - and no reasonable format comes close to the precision of CD.

Besides, my car is still old school and I don't plan on getting rid of it for years and years. It plays CDs - so I like a format I can take from my computer to my car, one that on occasion I can use on my old-school very kick-ass home sound system, and one that I can give to friends with - yes - cool cover art as a bonus, and know with a fair certainty they can play it in various places.

Being an old-fogey, I don't know how a memory stick would work for music ... but so far my experience with digital distribution and playback (such as on my iPhone for example) is that the playback time between tracks is not instantaneous, but rather varies greatly with each device and depending on many other operating system factors at the moment. This is completely unacceptable to me. Timing is everything, and my projects absolutely require there be ZERO time between tracks.

So you'll have to pry CD out of my cold, dead hands. And since I'm going to have an optical drive come hell or high water, I might as well have blu-ray capability.


On the Windows side, it looks like I'm going to be stuck with Windows 8 on pretty much any new computer - but I have such a big issue with Windows 7* that I'm actually not too apprehensive about this.




* customizing the appearance of folders is VITAL to me. It was a very cool feature of XP that they dropped for Windows 7, to my everlasting disgust. I work with lots of photo and music projects - and it was very handy for me to assign an image (such as an album cover) to a finished project and leave the unfinished ones without that embellishment. That way I could see at a glance which projects were done and which I was still working on. (Plus, it was pretty .... d'uh.)

I have no idea if Windows 8 allows once again for that type of folder customization, but I think I'll stop by the Windows Store at lunch and see if I can find out.

I've done a fair bit of research on Windows desktops in the last 48 hours, and I think I'm leaning toward the Dell XPS One 27 Touch. The screen is just too sexy, and only the Apple iMac 27 has that kind of high resolution. And that Dell seems to come out second only to the iMac in all kinds of 2013 ratings I've looked out over the past couple of days. I don't want to rush into anything, but being without my home computer is very distressing to me!

:iSm:

I use Windows 7 and I have many custom folder icons.
1: Right-click on a folder you want to customize and select "Properties."
2: In the "Customize" tab, go to the "Folder icons" section and click the "Change Icon" button.
3: Select an icon

Granted, that requires you to have a .ico file, so here's how you can convert .jpg to .ico.

You can select an Icon from their choices, but - as far as I've been able to tell - you cannot select a photo.


Anyway, the Dell XPS One is ultra super SEXAY!!! I get the kind of future feel I finally felt when I got my first iPhone, and that "Where's My Jet-pack/Flying car?" feeling is again stroked to satisfaction.

I don't see what the problem is with Windows 8. I played with it for a long time, and it's completely rad and intuitive. You can always switch back to Desktop mode if you want, but the regular version works as well with a keyboard and mouse as with touch. (But touch use is tres futuristic.)

The high-res, 27-inch screen is gorgeous. It's got a stand that swivels down to 60-degrees flat - - so what with the JJ StarTrek-looking interface, the MinorityReport touch control, and the near flat tilt function ... I seriously feel like I'm piloting a freaking star ship. It's rad.


BUT - the screen is super-duper glossy and reflective. As I'd been warned, this is NOT good for photo-editing - which is a lot of what I do, and sometimes (as in the current time) about 80% of what I do.



So I walked on over to the Apple Store, and their 27" high-res iMac beauty is non-reflective and polarizes to the ambient light in its setting. Drool. There's practically no tilt to the screen - but in truth, I'd likely only operate the computer by touch, and still do all my actual work within software apps with the mouse of old.

So - I'm back to considering an iMac with an external optical drive. Oddly enough, the Dell beats the Apple in terms of SEXAY (except of course, the Apple icon at the screen bottom is way sexier as a detail than the Dell name).


I will ponder more ... but I think these are the two finalists. PRICEY.

I don't mix music so I've only seen the timing issue on the USB stick in the car. Do you still get those gaps on professionally mixed collections? For example, I've got some deadmau5 (Random Album Title) that mixes all the tunes together with no gaps. It plays fine on all my devices, but not from the stick in the car. Very annoying! So I get your aggravation.

you can eliminate the gap by mixing them into one large music file, of course that means it's harder to play single songs, but if the goal is a continuous mix then that shouldn't be an issue.

And you can run a virtual PC inside a Mac but not the other way round.