Does my mini have an audio compressor/limiter

[Patman49]

I am not a complete idiot, but....(only partial)... I have encountered a problem I can't figure out. I am somewhat knowledgable on audio.... and I have some setting I can't find the control for in the audio dept. I have my mini set up on my big LCD TV and my Yamaha surround sound system. Somehow I have made a change in settings that is acting like a compressor/limiter which cuts back the gain on my audio upon the first notes of a loud song and it pulls down the volume and tries to control the volume like an automatic limiter or a device to normalize the volume. Has anyone got an answer as this is driving me insane. I like my rock and roll and other music and it's encroaching on my music experience. I hate to admit I'm a PC guy, but I am trying to switch over and sometimes I have trouble with the simplicity of the Mac operating system and try to make it difficult. (LOL) Please help, guys ! thanks....

Actually I've had my mini for a couple of yrs and I love the little thing. It's great !

Patman

 

[Patman49]

OKAY ! Somehow I changed some settings and I think its fixed I don't know if it was the normalizing settings or what I did, but for now it seems to be working okay now. Thanks anyway. I'll get this thing figured out sooner or later. My problem is I have had computers longer than most of you guys have been alive. I started with a Sinclair and then a Commodore 64 and then started building my own PCs back when they would even do anything like they do now. I am used to controlling everything and with a Mac you have to do some things the way they have the system set up to do it and I am used to doing it my way. I don't like itunes at all. I know it works, but I don't want all my music on the C: drive. SO I don't want to import all of it from another drive where I have t already stored. Why fill up your drive with data when you have it on an external drive that is portable and you can take it where you want and play it on other systems too. It seems silly and I have it on two hard drives so its backed up along with my movies and my photos. I never like to use my c: drive for all my data since it is only 320 GB or something and I leave room for other things except big collections of data files. I've been using VLC Media player and just dropping the files there from my USB portable 2.5" drives. It works great and I don't have to import the whole collection into Itunes library. Does anyone else do this or am I a freak?

Thanks guys !

 

[bobtomay]

iTunes does not require you to have all your music on your local drive. My MacBook Air certainly does not have room for my media which is currently about 4 TB worth and all sits on RAID1 external drives which are attached via eSATA to my Win7 box.

Open up iTunes - on the Menu bar go to iTunes - Preferences - Advanced tab - uncheck both of those top 2 boxes - "Keep iTunes media...organized" and "Copy files to..."

There is no such thing as a "C:/" drive in OS X. I personally like to use the term "system drive" (or partition) since it carries across all the OSs.

You'll find there are quite a few around here with a similar experience to yours. I started on the game players in the 70s, of which the Intellivision was my favorite. Moved to the TI-99-4A around '81, to the Comm 64 & 128, to x86 around the DOS and MS DOS 6 days, to building my own rigs, to overclocking beginning with one of the best overclocking chips of the day - the great AMD 100 Mhz CPU.

And you're right, it takes some getting use to for those of us use to tweaking the bejeezus out of our Windows rigs to let go of that mindset.

 

[dtravis7]

Ditto here. I started with the early Atari 2600 and got a Commodore 64 soon after, moved to the Atari 130XE then Atari ST, then Amiga. After that I got my first 286 PC with MS DOS 3.3! There are some here who have been into computers since pretty close to the beginning of it all I guess!

It sounds like Bob answered your questions. If we can help in any other way, just let us know.