MikeSpike.org

Where I work, Apple computers is the standard for Communications majors. That being said, we’ve got a few labs with Mac Pro’s and 13 individual editing suites. The edit suites provide the students with a cubical shunned away from the world by a sliding glass door allowing their video creativity juices to flow. In the labs, there is a desktop at the front of the room dedicated for the teacher with wall-mounted speakers and a projector. Although all this hardware looks great on the outside, one issue that came up was audio. Since the change to Intel chips, the three audio sources (headphone, audio speaker and line-out) which if you remember, would auto-switch based on what was plugged in, has now changed to three independent sources. What this means is if a user wants to make any changes to how audio gets routed they must make the change manually. To add to this issue, my environment consists of users logging in individually every time they use a machine whether it’s in a classroom or in an editing suite. If the audio changes were a global change, I wouldn’t be having this issue; but because it has a default value (front speaker jack) for each person that logs in, I’m stuck with another problem. Which if you are thinking, I’m leaving all my grunts and complaints about OSX’s “features” in a lab environment for another blog post. Read the rest of this entry »