Mac OS X: The Missing Manual, Second Edition

Chapter 14. Sound, Movies, Speech, and Handwriting

For years, as other computer companies whipped themselves into a frenzy trying to market one multimedia computer or another, Mac fans just smiled. Macs have been capable of displaying sound and graphics—no add-on sound, graphics, or video boards required—from day one, years before the word multimedia was even coined.

The Mac’s superiority at handling sound and video continues in Mac OS X. QuickTime, for example, is software that lets you play digital movies on your screen and watch live “streaming” broadcasts from the Internet. This chapter covers both creative pursuits: creating and using sound, and playing and editing movies.

As a bonus, this chapter also covers Mac OS X’s speech features: how to command your Mac by voice, as well as making your Mac talk back.

Playing Sounds

You can have a lot of fun with digital sounds—if you know where to find them, where to put them, and how to edit them. You can play almost any kind of digitized sound files, even MP3 files, right in the Finder—if you put its window into column view (Section 1.6). But that’s just the beginning.

Controlling the Volume

Adjusting the volume of your Mac’s speakers couldn’t be easier: Just add the speaker menulet to your menu bar, as directed in Figure 14-1. That illustration also shows the Sound panel of System Preferences, which offers another way to go about it.

Note

Actually, all current Macs offer an even more direct way to control the speaker volume: speaker-control ...