Although Sound Studio 3 is great for people who need to record audio for game development, GarageBand, Podcasts, etc., it's priced low enough for those who simply want to touch up their music, convert analog audio for the iPods or CD, or just want to have some fun. The program is no more intimidating to the user than iMovie, and that's pretty impressive.

If all you want to do with GarageBand 2 is drag some loops around, no problem. You don't need a manual to show you how to do that. But, if you want more control of those loops, if you want to create your own loops or if you want to bypass loops altogether and lay down some by-God rock and roll licks, then it's time once again to turn to David Pogue, O'Reilly Media and the Missing Manual series.

I'm extremely pleased with the iH5. Compared to other iPod speakers, it's a terrific price, and you get a lot more functionality: an iPod charger, a radio, and an alarm clock. It's easy to use and well-built, and the sound quality is excellent.

Remember Kai's Power Goo? It was a graphics program that pretty much allowed you to smoosh up people's faces. In every review I read, every example I saw, that's all people were doing with it; importing photos of faces and distorting them in funhouse mirror ways. It was completely impractical, but fun to use. particleIllusion, a particle effects generator, is just as fun to use, but is also extremely practical. The fun stems from the ease of use while still obtaining very impressive results. The practicality is the result of the ability to get your impressive results into your Final Cut, Motion or even iMovie projects.

Here we are at a point where we can actually speak to our teammates and opponents while playing online games. Although such gaming sessions are usually reserved for your hardcore PC and Xbox gamers, that doesn't mean the technology is lost on Macintosh users. GameRanger offers in-game voice communication to their premium subscribers, and it's very easy to set-up and use. So, where do you turn for the hardware? Denmark.

Give Roxio credit. The easier Apple has made it to burn DVDs and CDs on your Mac, the more reasons Roxio has given us to spend the extra money to purchase Toast. Toast 7 is no exception, providing many new features that'll make you wonder what you ever thought was so great about Toast 6. If you didn't think Toast 6 was all that great, Toast 7 may have you singing a different tune.

In many ways, your initial reaction to iDrum will mirror whatever was your reaction to GarageBand. If you've worked with similar programs, the format will be almost immediately accessible, and all the important controls are staring you in the face. iDrum is not, however, the killer app that GarageBand is, but only because it takes more expertise to use it effectively. It is an incredibly good helper app with high aspirations. If you are regularly making music with your computer, and having full control over your percussion is important, this is the program you want.

The various voices provided on the Mac range from the OK to silly, and they'll work in a pinch. But if you want or need to listen to your computer, you may want a change. To provide this change, the Cepstral company can provide up to 10 US English voices (with 2 British voices) to satisfy most needs.

OK, you have your iPod, you've downloaded 167 songs from iTunes, you've brought over every CD you own into your iTunes and have added those songs to your iPod, and you are still not satisfied. What do you do? Well, if you have The Boom Box, you can bring in your photograph albums, record stuff off the net, bring in podcasts, listen to self-created audio books, and enjoy new shuffle combinations you might not else wise have thought to mix.

A complete course in Macintosh filmmaking and DVD design

Where are all the iSight accessories? Where are the cases and fish-eye lens adapters and filters and stuff. The iSight could be tremendously fun instead of just tremendously useful, we just need a few entrepreneurs to get busy. Entrepreneurs like the good folks and DVForge and Griffin Technology, who have given us the SightFlex and SightLight, respectively.

Sorenson Media is finally offering WMV output courtesy of Flip4Mac from Telestream. This comes in either WMV Studio or WMV Studio Pro for $99.00 or $179.00, respectively. With either of these, Squeeze can now import and encode Windows Media 9 audio and video. It's somewhat frustrating that Sorenson Media doesn't roll this support into the Sorenson Squeeze 4.1 Compression Suite, but that they support it all is a tremendous help for those of us who occasionally have to succumb to the irrational whims of our PC oriented clients.