[P1] Griffin iMic

[Chris Volpe]

On Thursday, December 12, 2002, at 12:40  PM, iBook List wrote:

[P1] Griffin iMic... Has anyone used or had any experience with the 
Griffin iMic?

Hi Brian-
I bought one of these for the exact purpose you name. It worked as 
advertised on a TiBook 400 I was using before I got my iBook. The iMic 
is basically a hardware solution - it's just an adapter that allows you 
to use your iBook's USB port for direct audio in. You'll need software 
to handle the actual recording of sound in from your stereo. You will 
also need to supply your own cable that you can run from your stereo's 
audio out (most likely an RCA type jack) to the iMic's 1/8" jack - you 
can buy whatever cord you'll need at RadioShack pretty inexpensively. 
The iMic's a nice little converter for direct audio in. Griffin offers 
free software on their site for converting vinyl to digital but I 
haven't tried it. There are several shareware and even freeware apps 
that will work too, I think. I like Sound Edit a lot (9 and X versions 
available) for basic recording and tweaking. I think an early version 
of Toast used to include software for this, too - it let you record a 
whole cassette, then it automatically segmented the tracks into 
separate mp3s, but it seemed a little kludgy at the time, and I never 
really got the hang of using it. Eventually I just recorded & converted 
individual tracks to mp3 manually. Ended up using the iMic for another 
project too - to record music directly from a pickup on my guitar into 
the Mac in SoundEdit - worked nicely. I'd encourage you to try it, and 
would be interested to hear about your experiences if you check out 
some of the other audio apps that are out now designed for just this 
purpose (search for them on www.versiontracker.com.) It's so cool how 
many different things our iBooks can do.

Chris