By Jason Snell

March 25, 2016 10:00 AM PT

Recording the Upgrade in-car podcast

Note: This story has not been updated for several years.

On Monday afternoon I recorded this week’s episode of Upgrade live from Interstate 280, driving home from the Apple event in Cupertino. It was an experiment—I thought it might be fun to do something different for our post-event podcast, and on a day absolutely packed with work, it also allowed me to do something productive with the long drive between Apple and my home north of the Golden Gate Bridge.

I’m pretty happy with the final result, though I wouldn’t recommend recording every episode of your podcast in a moving car. I’m impressed that we only seem to have received one complaint about the danger of podcasting while driving—if you’re opposed to all in-car phone calls, then we’ll just have to disagree—and happy to have heard from numerous people who were entertained by the sound of my turn signals, the beep of the Automatic connected to my car, and the sound of the sudden downpour that happened in the vicinity of San Francisco International Airport.

A few people were wondering what equipment we used to make the podcast, so here’s the scoop:

My microphone was a Sony ECM-77B, which is a small clip-on design that I usually use for recording videos. With it clipped to my shirt, I was able to record without taking my hands off the wheel of my 2005 Honda Civic Hybrid. I attached it to my Zoom H6 portable recorder, which I bought last year. It’s capable of recording six microphones at once, but in this case I was only recording the one.

Myke Hurley and I tried to chat via Skype, but that connection wasn’t stable, so we switched to the telephone. Myke loaded some credits into his Skype account and called my iPhone from Skype, and I kept one earbud in my ear (you can’t cover both ears while driving in California) and talked to Myke during my drive. Listeners to the live stream heard me sound like I was on the telephone, because I was.

Once the drive was over, I ran the file through the automatic dialogue denoiser plug-in in iZotope RX 5, and then sent it off to Myke so he could use it to replace the audio he had recorded of me talking via the telephone. He imported the file into Logic and manually ducked the audio when I wasn’t talking, so the sound would seem consistent—if we cut it off entirely when I wasn’t talking, the change in sound was really distracting. This was a lot of extra work on Myke’s part, but I think it made the end product sound that much better.

I left Apple in the early afternoon, and there was almost no traffic on my return home, so the podcast literally covers every moment I was driving from Cupertino to my house. We wrapped up the podcast with me sitting in my chair at home as I usually do! I leave the calculation of my average driving speed across the trip as an exercise to the listeners.

By Jason Snell

March 24, 2016 2:00 PM PT

A few Lightning USB 3 Adapter follow-ups

Note: This story has not been updated for several years.

Some additional items that came up after I posted my story about Apple’s new Lightning adapter:

• As is detailed on the product’s spec sheet, it works with lots and lots of iPads. It also worked fine with my iPhone 6S, even though it’s not listed on Apple’s chart. The product’s marketing seems focused on the iPad Pro—and USB 3 transfer speeds can only be achieved on the 12.9-inch iPad Pro model—but it’s got more broad off-label utility.

• Though my story was focused on the iPad as a podcasting platform, after I recorded with my iPhone 6S I realized how amazing it would be to record a full-quality podcast with nothing but a small, high-quality microphone and an iPhone. Talk about portability! Unfortunately, as I mentioned in the story, Apple needs to open up microphone access to multiple apps on iOS before this can work. (My preferred iOS audio editing app, Ferrite, works just fine on iPhone. It’s just cramped.)

• Fraser Speirs asked on Twitter if the Camera app on the iPhone or iPad would automatically pick up the audio from an attached USB microphone. This morning, I attached the adapter and the Yeti to my iPhone 6S and took some video in the Camera app, and the sound that was captured came from the Yeti itself. So the answer is yes!

• Phil Schiller said you can connect an iPad to Ethernet via a USB-to-Ethernet adapter, so I tried it. Even in Airplane Mode or with Wi-Fi turned off, I was able to connect to the Internet via my Ethernet adapter, so it works! However, I can’t figure out where you can see any evidence that you’re on Ethernet, or any way to adjust networking settings. But it does seem to work.

By Jason Snell

March 23, 2016 4:09 PM PT

Apple’s Lightning to USB 3 adapter brings iPad podcasting one step closer

Note: This story has not been updated for several years.

While introducing the new 9.7-inch iPad Pro at Monday’s press event, Apple marketing chief Phil Schiller made an aside about a new accessory, the $39 Lightning to USB 3 Camera Adapter:

This is a really powerful accessory, a USB [adapter]. Sure, it lets you plug in your camera, which many of us do, but because it’s powered, you can use a lot of powered USB devices. For example, you can plug in an Ethernet adapter to get on your corporate network. And for those of you who are podcasters, you can plug in a microphone and do your podcast right from an iPad Pro.

I’m a podcaster and an iPad Pro user, so I considered letting out a cheer in the small Town Hall theater, but didn’t want to be the only one. I looked down at iMore’s Rene Ritchie, two rows in front of me, just as he started to clap, and then I joined in. (We did it, everyone, we got podcasting on an iPad to elicit a cheer at an Apple event!)

It’s two days later and I’ve taken delivery of one of these adapters, and have given it a try. The short version is, yes indeed, it works as Apple indicated. But there are also a few quirks to be aware of—and this doesn’t remove all the roadblocks to using an iPad Pro as a dedicated podcasting machine.

Powering microphones and mixers

Though there’s been a USB-Lightning adapter for some time now, the issue with using a USB microphone for podcasting has been all about power. As Schiller indicated, most common USB microphones require more power than the iPad can deliver—and so they just won’t work if you plug them in to the adapter. One workaround people discovered for this was to attach a powered USB hub to the adapter, and then plug a microphone into the hub… but it was a messy solution.

The new adapter solves this problem by getting wider, adding a Lightning port right next to the existing USB port. This means that you can use a USB device while powering your iPad, which wasn’t possible with the old model. (I sometimes stream live podcast audio via an external USB device, but had to be sure that my battery was fully charged before I did that. Similarly, if you want to hook your iPad to your corporate Ethernet network, as Schiller suggests, you’d probably also want to keep your battery topped up while you worked.)

The power that comes to the adapter via Lightning doesn’t just power the iPad—it’s also feeding the USB device you attach to the adapter. When I first tried to attach audio devices to my iPad Pro, I learned an important lesson: If you want to get power out of the adapter, you’ve got to put power into it. When I attached my USB-to-Lightning cable to Apple’s 5 watt USB power adapter—the tiny cube Apple includes with iPhones—I had no success. When I switched to the larger 12-watt brick, though, everything started to work.

I was able to attach both my Blue Yeti microphone and an XLR-based microphone via the Sound Devices USBPre 2 USB mixer to my iPad Pro with no problem. Both showed up as inputs in Ferrite Recording Studio immediately. This all worked on my iPhone 6S, too—same adapter, same microphones, same result.

One funny thing I noticed accidentally is that when I removed the USB end of my Lightning-USB cable from the power adapter and plugged it into my iMac, it didn’t register the iPad as being present—the adapter seems to only use its lightning port as a source of power.

But we’re not there yet

So once the applause from Phil Schiller mentioning iPads and podcasting on stage dies down, where does this leave us? If you’re someone who wants to record a podcast in person using an iOS device and a USB mixer or microphone, you’re set. But most of the podcasts I do are conversations that are conducted over the Internet, usually using Skype. And for the iPad to be a viable device for those kinds of podcasts, Apple needs to update its software.

In short, the audio inputs on iOS need to be accessible by more than one app at a time. Right now I can make a Skype call on my iPad, or I can record my voice to a file on my iPad, but I can’t do both at once—the moment a second app wants access to the microphone, the first one has to give it up. Changing that one behavior in iOS 10 would be enough to allow me to travel and record podcasts without bringing my MacBook Air with me. (I can already edit podcasts on iOS quite well—I edited this week’s Incomparable on my iPad Pro, in fact.)

There’s more Apple could do here, like offer apps access to system audio or the audio output of individual apps, so I could record the sound coming out of Skype, as I do with Call Recorder or Audio Hijack on my Mac today. This seems less likely to happen to me, but I can still dream. (Skype could also adopt Apple’s existing Inter-App audio, allowing other apps to record its output, but this seems even less likely to me.)

(An aside: Yes, you can record remote podcasts entirely on iOS today if you use two devices, such as an iPhone and an iPad. One of them serves as your Skype device while the other one acts as a recorder. It’s really not an ideal situation, especially if you want to hear both your own microphone input and the voices of the people you’re podcasting with.)

It would also be helpful if Apple improved importing files from USB devices and SD cards. Right now iOS is a whiz at importing photo and video files from attached USB devices and cards, but it fails at other file types. I travel with an audio recorder that saves files to an SD card (and also can attach via USB)—but once I record audio there, there’s no way to transfer it to my iPad. It would be great if external media was accessible via standard iOS open and import sheets. Right now, if I want to travel and record something on my fancy six-track USB recorder, I am unable to work with those files on my iPad without the intervention of a Mac.

So there’s more work to do on this front, but this new adapter removes another barrier. Podcasters like me are now one step closer to the dream of doing it all on iOS. I hope Apple eliminates the final roadblock with iOS 10 this fall. Until then, my MacBook Air will be mandatory equipment whenever I’m traveling and podcasting simultaneously.

By Dan Moren

March 22, 2016 1:46 PM PT

Adventures in troubleshooting AirDrop

Note: This story has not been updated for several years.

The downside of technology that’s indistinguishable from magic is that when it doesn’t work as expected, it often feels like we have to resort to mystical incantations¹ to fix things.

A couple weeks back I noticed that AirDrop on my iPhone wasn’t working as expected: whenever I opened the Share sheet to send a photo over to my laptop, no devices showed up as available destinations. I was irritated, but busy, so I just used some other, less convenient form of file transfer, deciding I would save troubleshooting for another time.

That other ended up being today, when I hit my breaking point. I use AirDrop a lot to send screenshots from my iPhone to my MacBook Air, and it annoyed me that I was having to resort to kludgier solutions.

The plot thickened when it seemed that though no devices showed up in the iPhone’s Share sheet, the iPhone itself shows up in AirDrop from my Mac and my iPad.

So I turned to the troubleshooter’s best friend, Google, and typed in my mystical incantation to see what the all-powerful Internet hive mind suggested. Here are the suggestions I found, all of which I tried:

• Turning the iPhone’s Wi-Fi off and on again.
• Turning the iPhone’s Bluetooth off and on again.
• Turning both the iPhone’s Wi-Fi and Bluetooth off and on again.
• Turning AirDrop Off and on again.
• Turning the iPhone off and on again.
• Hard restarting the iPhone (holding down the Home button and Sleep/Wake button).
• Resetting the Network Settings.²
• Logging out of my iCloud account and back in again.³

Just now, as I was writing out this list, I realized I hadn’t tried to force-quit and restart the Photos app, so I did that. And weirdly enough, that seemed to make AirDrop work again–at least for now.⁴

Yet I still can’t be entirely sure that that’s what actually fixed it, and I think this is one reason that we’ve been having, of late, this discussion about the declining quality of Apple’s software.

When things don’t work as expected, it’s a) incredibly frustrating, because we are so used to them not only being functional, but working well, b) the number of troubleshooting tools at our disposal is fairly limited, especially on iOS, and even if you’re a pretty tech-savvy individual, and c) oftentimes when we do get things working again, we don’t even understand why.

All three of those factors taken together make the technology, which can feel magical at the best of times, instead seem downright capricious. Especially because as humans, we take these random events personally, sensing an unfounded animus that leads us to conclude that this broken thing is targeting us, specifically and maliciously.

The black-box aspect of modern technology is a double-edged sword: we rave about when things “just work” and rail when they just don’t work. But then again, maybe that’s all part of the deal we made to get a little more magic into our lives.

[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors, as well as an author, podcaster, and two-time Jeopardy! champion. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His next novel, the sci-fi adventure Eternity's Tomb, will be released in November 2026.]

By Dan Moren

March 22, 2016 8:13 AM PT

Password-protecting Notes in iOS 9.3 and OS X 10.11.4

Note: This story has not been updated for several years.

Password-protected items in Notes was one of the major features Apple touted for its spring software updates—but it may not be quite what you envisioned. Protecting notes isn’t about assigning a password to each individual item, but rather creating a general password for Notes, and then choosing whether to lock certain notes with that password. In other words, it’s an all-or-nothing proposition.¹

The good news is that, at least in my initial experience, iCloud does a perfectly good job of syncing your password and locked note status between your devices, including iOS and OS X.

OS X

Securing notes on OS X is pretty straightforward: just select a note, click the padlock icon in the toolbar, and select Lock This Note. Done. (You may have to enter your Notes password or create one if you haven’t already done so.) By default, the note will still be visible, and will just have an open padlock icon on it. To actually lock your notes, you can choose Close All Locked Notes from the padlock menu; quitting Notes will also automatically close all your locked notes. Locked notes won’t show any content in the preview pane, or in the list of your notes.

Viewing a locked note just means typing your Notes password and hitting return.

If you want to totally remove a lock later, then you can select a note, click the same padlock icon, and choose Remove Lock; you’ll be prompted to enter your Notes password to do so.

iOS

The process on iOS is a little trickier, if only because it’s not as obvious. To lock a note on your iPhone or iPad, you need to tap the Action button and then find the Lock Note option. (You’ll need to enter your password if you haven’t done so.) A padlock icon will show up at the top of a secure note, letting you unlock or lock it at will. As on OS X, viewing a locked note requires you to enter the password.

iOS devices also let you use Touch ID to view your secure notes (which you have to enable by going to Settings > Notes), but I noticed an oddity with it during my tests.

When I initially created a Notes password, Touch ID worked fine, but when I used my workaround to create a second notes password, I could only use my fingerprint to open some of my secured notes. It seemed to be the notes associated with whichever password I had most recently used to lock a note—i.e. if I clicked the lock button on a note secured with ‘password2’ I could use Touch ID to open any note secured with ‘password2’ but would have to type in the password for any note secured with ‘password1’. And vice versa. Once again, it’s clear why Apple adopted a one password approach.

You can also remove a lock for a note on iOS by tapping on the Action button and choosing Remove Lock.

[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors, as well as an author, podcaster, and two-time Jeopardy! champion. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His next novel, the sci-fi adventure Eternity's Tomb, will be released in November 2026.]

By Jason Snell

March 21, 2016 9:35 PM PT

Tea and scones in Cupertino: The “Loop You In” Apple event

Note: This story has not been updated for several years.

When Apple wants to throw a big coming-out party for a product, it does it in style, renting out the Yerba Buena theater, or Moscone West, or the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium, or the Flint Center, or the California Theater.

When it doesn’t, it holds an event in the tiny Town Hall venue. Monday was one of those. When Stephen Hackett and I recapped Town Hall’s history, I was struck by something Steve Jobs said at an event in 2006: he introduced the event by saying the products on display would be “medium scale.” Talk about setting expectations.

Monday’s event wasn’t quite that—a new iPhone of any kind and a new flagship iPad certainly deserve a bit more credit—but it was still a Town Hall event. A cozy get-together, not a blow-out rager.

Continue reading “Tea and scones in Cupertino: The “Loop You In” Apple event”…