Home Page | Powerbook 3400c | Running off a Flash Card
A few weeks after I brought my Powerbook 3400 back to life, I decided that one of its main uses will be as an oldies music jukebox. Believe it or not, older Macs running on at least the Power PC 603 or 604 chip can handle the playback of MP3 files. The Powerbook 3400 has a PPC 603 processor. My particular model is maxed out with a total of 144MB of Ram memory, enough to run Mac OS 8.6, standard (but older) internet programs, word processors and simple imaging software. It can also play MP3s. SOUNDAPP PPC We are not talking about iTunes here. With a Mac this old running on OS 8.6, not even the version of iTunes that ran on Mac OS9 could run on this little puppy unless I upgraded the OS to version 9 (which I have no intention of doing). The freeware application known as SoundApp PPC version 2.73 will do the job for MP3 playback and CD ripping for the Powerbook 3400. This Powerbook is running off a 1 GB compact flash memory card. SoundApp was installed on the compact flash card. You can download a copy from places such as TuCows or from the Headgap Web or Telefinder BBS (I'll write on this another day). I think development on SoundApp PPC was discontinued a few years ago. While no longer supported, this program is useful for anyone who wants to play or rip MP3 music files to their older Power PC Macintosh. Installation of SoundApp is simple. Just unstuff the compressed .SIT file and make sure it goes to the correct destination on your hard drive or other media storage device during the installation process. Be sure to carefully follow the simple installation steps. INSTALLING YOUR MUSIC Next is the music. I have a Power Mac G4 with a large external hard drive where I keep my music and sound library. Most of the songs and other files on this volume were ripped from my CDs, with a few converted AIFFs coming from other sources such as my vinyl record collection. I also have about 120 AAC files of tracks I bought from the iTunes music store. These and podcasts downloaded from iTunes can all be played on my Power Mac G4, iTunes or loaded to my iPods. Since we are talking about an older Mac here, all of the AAC tracks purchased from the Apple Store are out. SoundApp doesn't support the file format. Everything else it does, which is mainly MP3. From backup CDs that I had previously burned off the hard drive, I installed those MP3 tracks that I wanted onto the rather measly 4 GB internal hard drive on the Powerbook. Mind you that this drive is kind of flaky, and may someday totally give up the ghost. But since all of the songs are duplicates of what I already own, I have no fear in installing them to the Powerbook 3400. USING SOUNDAPP PPC After the MP3s were loaded to the Powerbook 3400 hard drive, it was time to organize them into playlists on SoundApp. One of the easiest ways to use SoundApp is just to go to the file menu and press the PLAY option. A dialog box will open up, you navigate to the song title you want, select it and play. The selection will play and when it is over, you repeat the process again. This is great if you only want to play one selection at a time. The real power to SoundApp (like almost any other MP3 playing software) is to create your own playlists. SoundApp allows you to do this by going to the file menu and selecting NEW PLAYLIST. Once you do this a blank window shows up and you fill it by selecting the ADD option. Navigate to your music library folder and select the songs you want to show up in the playlist. If you are adding multiple songs, hold down the SHIFT key and keep on making selections from your music library folder until your playlist is done. You will notice that SoundApp PPC only lists song titles by file name. It is not very good at doing that either as songs with long titles have their names truncated. Bottom line is that you are going to have to know your song titles very well. There are no artist listings whatsoever, which means you also need to know the artist names to each song title if you want to create a specific playlist for a particular artist. Once this is done, it is a matter of playing back your song list. SoundApp offers several options which are listed at the bottom of each PLAYLIST. They include PLAY which allows you to play a song one at a time from your list, or PLAY ALL at which time SoundApp PPC will play all of the songs in order how they are listed or at random if you also check off the SHUFFLE option. If you want to have the music play all day long, select the option to REPEAT your playlist. Besides the Playlist window, SoundApp PPC also provides you with a CONTROLS panel that allows you to set volume, play, pause, skip forward or backward and stop your music. Playing music through my Powerbook 3400's tiny stereo 4-way speaker system is adequate though somewhat "tinny" in sound reproduction. Like most computers, if you want to get full sound from your music files connect a headphone to the output jack or connect the computer to a powered speaker or full size stereo component system. On the Powerbook 3400, users need to beware that running SoundApp PPC all by itself when playing back music files is recommended. If you are going to run another program at the same time as SoundApp and actively use your Mac for another function, playback will stop at several occasions as the processor has to switch back and forth from one task to another. RIPPING MUSIC FROM CDs To rip tracks off a CD, you insert the CD into your CD drive, Go to the FILE menu and select the option to CONVERT. Once you do that, navigate to the desktop, select your CD and a dialog box with track selections from the CD will show up. They are generically labeled as Track 1, Track 2, Track 3, etc. Select the track(s) you want to rip and the format you want to rip it to. Best to select AIFF, though beware that AIFF are large files. Unfortunately you this version of SoundApp PPC will not allow you to convert your files to MP3. If you have a newer Mac move the AIFF file to iTunes and convert it there or just simply rip the CD in iTunes to MP3 and move the tracks to the older Mac. One thing I noticed is that SoundApp allowed me to rip a supposedly copy protected CD and move its AIFF tracks off the Powerbook 3400 and to my newer Mac for conversion to MP3 or AAC in iTunes. FILE FORMATS SUPPORTED SoundApp PPC plays back a myriad of sound file types including MP3, MOD, snd, Windows WAV, AIFF, audio CD, and several other obscure types which I know nothing of. The program does not support newer file types such as Apple's AAC, Windows WMA or Sony Altrac. DOCUMENTATION Documentation for the SoundApp program is built into the ABOUT SOUND APP option that you pull from the Apple Menu. There is also a READ ME file that is included with the program and rudimentary help files accessible from the HELP menu. IMAGE: Select to see a large image of the SoundApp PPC program windows.
Click Here to Download SoundApp 2.7.3
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