As hard to believe as it may seem, not everyone has an iPod. Thus, personal sound systems such as the iM3 or the original InMotion are not necessarily the best personal speaker system for everyone. This is exactly where the iM4 comes into play.

The XT1 are speakers for your laptop. That's it. There are probably two main users for these speakers: the person who wants better sound for his laptop and/or the person who makes presentations and wants the sounds for his Keynote presentation to be heard beyond the second row of seats. Altec Lansing's XT1 speakers fill both jobs more than admirably.

With GarageBand, Apple has given all of us leftover Night Ranger wannabes (and maybe even the Night Ranger guys themselves) the chance to record our music directly on the Macintosh. GarageBand 2 makes this process even easier and the capabilities more powerful, but they still haven't given us a good way to move our music directly from the guitar to the Mac. The pros at Griffin Technology have conveniently stepped in, offering two low-cost, high quality methods for recording "real instruments," as GarageBand appropriately calls them, on your computer.

The iM3 is an update to Altec Lansing's original inMotion, which both Gary Coyne and I have reviewed for Applelinks. Gary reviewed a later version that allowed for compatibility with a wider range of iPods, and therefore liked it a bit more than I did. The iM3 addresses problems we both had, but doesn't tackle all of them, and introduces a couple new ones.

Got a job for you, design some inexpensive personal speakers with clarity, nice bass, full sound, simple to set up, and oh yeah: make sure they look beautiful. Sure, why not.

I recently reviewed the ATI Radeon 9800 Pro Mac Special Edition 256MB AGP for G5, and I thought that was the best thing I'd ever seen in 3D graphics technology. After giving the ATI Radeon X800 XT Mac Edition for G5 a whirl, I've realized two things: the 9800 Pro's dominance was short lived, and ATI has to adopt shorter naming schemes.

When I reviewed Dragon Burn 3, I praised the flexibility it offered over Apple's built-in burning software. Two problems the software suffered, however, were its lackluster audio CD production capabilities and its lack of Video CD production abilities (offered by its main (and more expensive) competitor, Roxio Toast). I'm pleased to report that with the latest version, Dragon Burn 4, NTI has overcome both of those shortcoming and is offering an attractive, affordable package for those who need more options in their disk burning than the OS X burning software has to offer.

I recently purchased a G5 tower and, despite the thrill of this computer, I can best compare the sound coming out of the tower to my days as a kid with two tin cans and a string for a walkie-talkie. I guess Apple assumes that if you are purchasing a tower and care about sound, you will be purchasing a separate sound system. So, going from the cheap-tinny sound of the tower to the FX-6021 was a thrill.

Let's say you've purchased and downloaded a song from iTunes. As you well know, you can only transfer that song a certain number of times. Even worse, you have to burn that song using iTunes, which is pretty much useless when it comes to controlling audio level, time between songs, cross fades, etc. For that, you need Jam. Unfortunately, Jam can't play songs purchased from the iTunes Music Store, so you're screwed, right? Wrong. Play the song in iTunes, use WireTap Pro to record the song, then save that song as an MP3 or AIFF that Jam can read. Problem solved.

The loops that ship with GarageBand are good, but they span such a wide variety of genres and styles that it's hard to put together anything coherent with them. After posting numerous press releases from bandmateloops.com, I turned to them for help. I'm a rock guy, so I gave two of their rock loops collections a try: Bandmates Guitar Player - Electric Guitars and Bandmates Rock Drummer - Rock Drums.

What the inMotion is for, and excels in, is to provide personal sound for your iPod. This is not a unit to fill a room—although the inMotion can get quite loud, but loud is different from filling a room. Physics simply states that something this small cannot move enough air to fill a room. The four neodymium speakers provide excellent crisp tone with a pleasant amount of bass.

MyTV/fm is a surprisingly powerful tool that actually lives up to its claims. I'm still not convinced that--outside of those guys who make their living posting video and screen captures of Charlize Theron to their websites--anyone really needs this technology, but since when is technology about necessity?