I am an English teacher, and use my mac to create MP3 files for my students. I recently recorded some language cassette audio via line-in. On headphones, my AIFF recordings sound loud, crisp and clear, but on the MB speakers they are tinny and whisper quiet. Other recordings I’ve made from CD, etc don’t share this problem. Bizarrely, the quiet speaker volume level persists even if I use Audio Hijack Pro to ‘transfer’ the AIFF file to MP3. Weird.

Now, I am not the sharpest tool in the shed when it comes to this sort of thing. Does anyone have any ideas or pointers to other sources of possible advice?

day to day, i use a couple of freecom toughdrive’s and a bunch of usb keys, and they’re all problematic in a bunch of ways. sometimes keys don’t show up when i plug ‘em in. sometimes i can’t quit itunes or niceplayer (to name two) until i unplug my external usb hub / drives – and when this occurs the drives (not always all drives, sometimes just one) won’t unmount beforehand so i have to just pull the plug – the thought of dataloss disturbs me greatly.

after saying a quick prayer (or whatever good luck incantation i’m using that day) and unplugging and replugging all my usb everything starts working ok again afterwards.

also, i listen to a lot of music in itunes and i also run marcopolo (google it if you don’t know it!) – once every couple of days (or less) marcopolo will get confused for a few seconds – all my usb devices disappear (disconnect) and then my devices all come back, then shortly afterwards itunes playback will stall for a moment. grrr.

interestingly i run growl with hardware-growl also and i get a bunch of messages fly by on my screen when my usb stuff plays up in this way – disconnect and connect messages.

the usb problems were different in 10.5.1 – but still present. but i used 10.5.1 for less than a day.

i’ve tried not using any usb hubs, and i’ve tried only hooking up one drive at a time – i’ve tried lots of things – i rarely use airport and keep it turned off (likewise for bluetooth) – but the problem is still there.

my 10.5 install was a clean fresh install onto a clean drive – not an in-place upgrade. i never had these problems in 10.4 – and i’ve checked all my external usb hardware on other systems and it works fine.

i hope 10.5.3 comes soon – and i hope it fixes all these problems – 10.5.2 is a real turkey – in fact so far i’m really unimpressed with 10.5 in general.

what used to be ‘my lovely macbook’ has turned into an unreliable piece of junk since i installed 10.5 on it – i wish i’d never gone near it (and i didn’t install it until after the 10.5.2 update was released)

depressing.