Tools of the Trade. by Michael Coyle

After returning from Macworld in January, I mentioned a slick new product from DigiDesign (the ProTools people) called MBox. It's a high quality USB audio interface that ships with two Focusrite mic preamps, phantom power, digital SPDIF, and ProTools LE. Mine arrived today.

In my studio at work, there are rack mounted Focusrite mic preamps and the Mbox stands up to its big brother quite well.

When outdoors recording sound effects, one of the biggest problems is getting the headphones loud enough to hear what you are recording! The MBox has two headphone jacks, a 1/4 inch and 1/8 inch and the built in amp on MBox can get dangerously loud.

I'll tell you a little secret about the digital SPDIF connections. SPDIF has a reputation as the cheap cousin of the AES professional digital audio standard, but in reality, the signals are the same. One of the benefits AES has for users is that the signal is balanced so it's less susceptible to noise interference over long wire runs. It you go to Radio Shack and buy an RCA to mic connector adapter, you can run a short cable connecting SPDIF to any device with AES inputs.

If you are a musician and want to record quality audio at home on your Apple computer, take a serious look at the MBox. Not only is it a great piece of hardware, but it comes with ProTools LE.

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Jim McCarty emailed to say, "Noticed your plug for Paul Berkowitz and wanted to mention that Allen Watson also has an extensive collection of scripts. Both Paul and Allen are major contributors to the Entourage-talk mailing list.


Sometimes when I try to play MP3 audio files in a browser, the error box proclaims that I do not have the correct plug-in. I know for certain that the QuickTime plug-in is installed correctly, so what's the problem?

It seems that the mime settings, the settings that associates a files three letter extension with an application, are incorrect for QuickTime. It's possible that iTunes or some other MP3 player reset the mime type for MP3 audio to point to itself. Regardless of how the error was introduced, here is how to correct it.

Open the QuickTime Control Panel and set the popup menu to "Browser Plug-in", then click the "Mime Settings" button.

Scroll down through the mime types until you reach "MPEG audio file". You can see my old setting in the image below. Use the popup menu to select "Use QuickTime Plug-in". Close the control panel and you're browser is ready to play any MP3's you find on the internet.