Here's a case of a program getting better before I wanted it to. WireTap Pro, as it was, fit well into my audio editing pattern. But, Ambrosia as increased its functionality and launched WireTap Studio. The first thing users of WireTap Pro will notice is the price increase, as Studio is $50 more expensive (although registered users of WireTap Pro can upgrade from $30). At $69, WireTap Studio is no longer a logical recommendation simply for the ability to record audio off your Macintosh, meaning users will need to take full advantage of its new capabilities in order to get their money's worth.

The often updated Sorenson Squeeze has been...guess what. Updated! As I've mentioned in previous Squeeze reviews, this is bound to frustrate some users, because upgrades aren't cheap. Of course, this happens with all software, but is it really necessary for a video compression program to receive so many updates? Unfortunately, because of the ever changing web video landscape, the short answer is "yes." But at least Sorenson does a decent job of making it worth your money...depending upon which version you currently have.

GarageBand users who wish to create and record their own sounds quickly discover limitations to the "plug-n-play" capabilities of making music on the Mac. We struggle first with hearing anything picked up from the built-in mic, then contending with the atmospheric background noise it picks up. Efforts to use the 1/8" mini-jacks for sound input call for a trip to Radio Shack for adaptors for our 1/4" guitar and amp cables, and awkward behind-the-computer plug-n-pull calisthenics. M-Audio offers an overachieving solution for the beginning user to address interface needs for instruments and microphones.

Here's the dirty secret of SLR cameras: they get dirty. More specifically, the CCD or CMOS sensors get dirty. Depending on the kind of camera you have, your camera will have either a CCD (Charged Couple Device) or the CMOS (Complementary Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor), which is the device in digital cameras that acts as the film and receives the image. In normal operation, the sensor develops a high static charge, and if there is any dust near the sensor, the dust will get attached to the sensor by static electricity. If you can cope with the costs and have a delicate touch, you can do a great job of cleaning your camera's sensor with the VisibleDust system.

If I could retire tomorrow, I would, and I would spend the rest of my days creating cartoons and publishing them to YouTube. The amazing thing about this is that I can't draw. Not a line, not a shade. Even when I used to doodle during those boring high school government classes, it was always of mountain ranges with fighter jets far off the distance, always flying away from my point of view, thereby requiring as little detail as possible. With Toon Boom Studio, that's all I'd need to create a 2D cartoon.

I own cassettes. Looking back, I can't for the life of me figure out why. Why buy albums on cassette when I could just pick up the LP and tape it? Cassettes would get tangled up in players. They'd get dropouts. They'd get lost in the cars of classmates who's names I didn't even know. Cassettes were useless. Yet I have them. My entire Dead Milkmen collection is on cassette, including a couple albums that are otherwise out of print on all formats. It's sad. Thankfully, Ion Audio is here to help with the Tape 2 PC USB cassette deck.

Considering how simple it is to burn your own CDs, the only thing stopping me from converting my vinyl LPs to CD is getting the records onto the computer. Thankfully, there's no shortage of USB turntables available these days. There are even some units that will burn your albums directly to CD without needing a computer, but I don't trust those. I prefer to have control over sound quality, clean-up, track splits, etc. To that end, I looked to ION Audio's TTUSB10, and mostly liked what I saw.

If a web cam sounds like something you should have, or that could prove useful, Periscope has two things going for it: ease of set up and variety of distribution. However, at $40.00, it's priced too high for those wavering on whether there's a need or who would use such a program simply for fun.

Turbo.264's sole reason for being is to quickly—very quickly—format video for your iPod, iPhone, Apple TV or Sony PSP. The Turbo.264 hardware completely takes over the video compression to not only speed up the process by four to five times (although I found it mostly settled in at just above 50% faster), but to also completely free up your system resources for other tasks while it's doing its job. Want to work in Photoshop or play Tiberium Wars while you're formatting that two hour movie for your iPhone? Have at it.

If you don't care if your monitor is calibrated and/or you do not care if your photograph prints match what you see on your monitor, save your time and energy—stop reading this review. On the other hand, if you already do calibrate your monitor and/or have been thinking that calibration is a good idea, check out the Pantone® huey™PRO. The one feature that makes the hueyPRO stand out is that it changes your monitor brightness as the room's brightness conditions change.

A Mac user familiar with iLife will no doubt wonder why we might review any music recording software, given that GarageBand does these things in the way Mac users prefer: simply, and straight out of the box. The similarities are important, but they don't define Sequel, or limit it. While it makes sense for part of this review to work as a compare/contrast with GarageBand, with which I'll assume Applelinks' readers are familiar, there are additional features and strengths discussed that will, for some users, show that Sequel might be the tool for you.

So, let's say you need to convert a video. Say you've shot something on a Sony DV-R camcorder (which records straight to disc as a playable DVD .VOB file), and you want to edit it in DV, or upload it to YouTube as an AVI to decrease the video artifacts. Or maybe you have a DivX file that you want to add to your video iPod. The number of video formats and compression techniques can make this a big headache... unless you have MPEG Streamclip, a freeware utility from Squared5 that makes it a snap.