How Do I Get Sound in to or out of My Mac?

I would like to meet the genius at Apple who removed audio input and anything other than speaker output from a generation of Macs—one of which you probably own. The good news is there’s a microphone hidden in the iMac’s screen and below the screen in the PowerBooks and iBooks.

That may or may not solve your audio problems. But an inexpensive device called the Griffin iMic ($35; www.griffintechnology.com) will. Not to be confused with an actual microphone, the iMic is really a line-level-audio-to-USB converter that also has an audio output (Figure 5.3). I use one of these—it plugs into the Mac’s USB port—to connect my semipro mixing board to my iMac. If you need something more sophisticated, several ...

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