Over the last few months, I’ve been trying out Apple Music, Spotify Premium, Amazon Music Unlimited & Tidal. I also have my own music collection which is ripped to iTunes. My own collection is around 26,000 tracks, ripped from CD in Apples 256kbps AAC codec format using iTunes. I combine this with iTunes match both to backup my collection on apples’ servers in case of a disk failure & also to give me access to my music on my Apple & iOS devices. For years this has served me well & is a habit I will keep, but I was definitely interested in new music discovery so ventured into the world of streaming services.

I’m not going to write much about Spotify, Amazon or Apple Music. After trying all three I’ve got to say I found Spotify the best for music discovery but Apple Music the best for sound quality & overall experience. Bear in mind that I use iMacs, MacBooks, iPhones & iPads so I’m heavily into the Apple Ecosystem already.

I did find however that Apple Music offered no significant benefits over my locally stored AAC, so I cancelled that subscription & went back to sourcing & curating my own library.

On the whole, I’ve been very happy with 256kbps AAC. I mostly listen to music using my iMac and Creative Inspire 2.1 2400 speakers with bass sub (these powered speakers with sub are ancient & connect via a 3.5mm jack).

These speakers are pretty old now but they’ve always sounded great & as an average consumer I’ve never felt the need to upgrade them. I’m sure many people reading this will have fancy monitor speakers & separate DAC’s, but this is aimed more at the home user so you could probably skip the rest.

Last week I decided to give Tidal a go on their free trial. I’ve always played with the idea of Tidal, but with only a one month trial & a £20 a month price tag I’d always dismissed the service. I don’t personally know anyone else who has a Tidal account so it’s just not been on my Radar. After visiting Bang & Olufsen in Truro and hearing the most amazing sound, only to notice the owner was running tidal off his own iMac for that sound, I just had to give it a go.

What can I say, I’m blown away by Tidal. I signed up for the Hi-Fi account which offers 320kbps AAC, but also all tracks are available as lossless quality FLAC files. The FLAC streams sound incredible, even on my modest setup. I can hear aspects of favourite songs I’ve never heard, such as plectrum scratches in Steven Wilson tracks & high-frequency percussion in Porcupine Tree tracks.

I can hear a lot more high-frequency sounds, and vocals sound much crisper and cleaner. When compared to my AAC the sound is a lot more clear & less muddy. In comparison to my 256kbps AAC, it’s like listening to normal audio and listening with a towel over the speaker.

I’ve got a few albums in FLAC, but storage of my entire collection has never appealed to me due to the time it would take to manage the files & the various backups I’d have to keep. I’m now keeping my music collection in AAC for personal use & use on the go, but predominantly listening to tracks on Tidal if they are available.

Then we come onto the Tidal Masters. I could probably get even more out of them with better monitor speakers & an external DAC plugged into the mac, but as an average consumer listener, I’d rather hear the best I can with the kit I’ve already got. Masters do sound wonderful even on my kit, and although the MQA streams will be software decoded & downsampled slightly for my sound card in the iMac, there is no doubt the audio quality is sublime.

I’ve had no issues with buffering of the streams & I even love the Tidal interface, especially the spinning disc effect on full-screen mode.

I’ve got no problems at all with my personal collection staying in 256kbps AAC. The Matched tracks on iTunes match are deleted from my machine & re-downloaded so I have Apple’s own iTunes store copies/rips of the tracks. I’m not prepared at this point in my life to spend thousands on pro audio gear or a listening room. I just like to get the best out of the stuff I have & mixing my own collection in 256kbps AAC with a Tidal subscription seems to be a great compromise.

At £20 a month it is quite expensive, but well worth it if you listen to more than a few hours of music every month. I’m really enjoying the Tidal experience & the extra boost in sound quality seems to be worth it. I can cancel at any time & fall back on my own vast collection, but I’ll play it by ear month on month.

Tidal also sounds great played in hi-fi on my iOS devices, even when outputting to Bluetooth speakers, there is a definite improvement over my AAC tracks.

In the living room, we have a stereo pair of Sonos Play 1’s. We live in close proximity to neighbours & have a modestly sized living room as I expect most of my readers will, and the Play One’s in stereo are more than sufficient in terms of both sound quality & power output. I’ve added My local music library to the Sonos system & I’ve now added Tidal as a music service. Tidal works really well with Sonos & again it’s a definite sound upgrade from my AAC. Sonos will only support the Hi-Fi FLAC streams at the moment, but these are of CD quality on the whole so it’s a clean and crisp sound.

The Tidal App for iOS also supports Sonos as an output device so you can use the Tidal App and output your audio to your Sonos system. This is great for music discovery or to resume your listening when you come from outside listening on Headphones or in the car.

When using earbuds on my iPhone 6 with Tidal, the improvements are more subtle. Tidal tends to have a little less bass than Apple AAC files, but the sound on Tidal tends to be more rounded & a slightly nicer experience. When listening to my Sony headphones, there is definitely an improvement over AAC.

All of my kit is pretty standard and consumer level. It’s by no means audiophile quality, but most people I know are not that interested in investing thousands to listen to their music. I have a few Audiophile friends who have spent upwards of £20k on kit, and while it sounds wonderful, it’s a little bit of a diminishing return for the size of the improvement.

For now, I’ll enjoy all of my favourite tracks on Tidal and keep my own curated library in AAC to supplement and archive my music. It’s not a great deal to pay out each month & the quality improvement is of tangible value. 256kbps AAC to FLAC is a big jump in quality. Anything above that on consumer kit just seems like overkill for the size of the improvement you would see.

If you decide to give Tidal a go on a Mac, make sure to adjust your streaming settings to max out at Master, and also give Tidal exclusive use of the built-in audio device. This way Tidal will adjust your soundcards sample rates to take advantage of the improved audio streams. This really helped Masters to sound better on my machine (yes I know so downsampling will occur as my sound card can’t support that maximum sampling rate) But it does seem to max out my sound cards abilities & sound as good as it can on my current kit.

I know I’ll get a million audiophiles telling me I’m doing it wrong, but after reading all of the reviews & What Hi-Fi magazine I was still struggling to figure out what would sound good on my relatively primitive & low-end setup. I expect most people will want to maximize what they have rather than invest heavily in a lot of extra audio gear. If that is the case, I suggest you give Tidal a go on their free trial. It has definitely changed my music listening & I’m even seeking out awesome sounding albums like Led Zeppelin & Talk Talk.

Let me know your thoughts on this post & be nice.

The internet is a public place, but it is also a place where you can’t control data flows. As soon as you upload information or data to the internet, you need to assume it is now on public record. Even if you believe your account is private and secure, there is a good chance that at some point, the data will be used, resold or even hacked & released into the wild. If you approach the internet with this in mind it is very easy to secure your information. I’ll come to internet security later, but let’s start with your hardware itself.

I personally have a lot of computers. I have two Macbook Pro’s and an iMac, I also have Raspberry Pi’s running various versions of Linux & also an old IBM Thinkpad X200 running Trisquel Linux. All of these machines use full disk encryption.

With apple products, make sure your software is up to date. All of my machines run OS Sierra which is a free upgrade. Sierra has a very good version of full disk encryption known as Filevault 2. Filevault 2 allows you to encrypt the entire contents of your hard drive with a password. This means that without the password, the contents of the Hard Drive can’t be read by a third-party. File Vault requires the disk password as soon as you start your machine, so anyone who steals your hardware will be unable to boot your machine to access information & also unable to wipe the hard drive to reinstall the OS on your hard drive. This is vital in case of loss or theft of your devices. We store so much personal information on our devices & their security is as important as securing your own home. Perhaps more important.

The same goes for iPhones. Make sure you use a strong passcode or passphrase to secure your device & consider not using fingerprint access. Your fingerprint is very convenient, but a strong passcode is much more secure. Also, backup your iPhone or iPad to an actual computer and not to iCloud. If someone hacks your iCloud, they could clone your iPhone from one of your own backups & access your entire iOS environment.

The passwords you use should be unique & strong. You should also ensure that your encryption password is never stored or used for any online accounts. Your encryption password should be unique from any other password you use. You can choose a way of codifying your password, for instance take your favourite book (paper back or hard back) and use your birthday to select a page and a line. For instance, pick up a copy of Harry Potter, go to the page number which relates to your day of birth and then on that page go to the line number which relates to your month of birth. Use the text on that line for your password.

You can use any method to code your password, that is just a single example. Whatever you choose, make sure you have a way of reminding yourself which is not obvious. Without your encryption password your data would be lost forever.

Also, on Macs, make sure you disable any guest accounts in Settings > Users & Groups. Turn on the Firewall in Settings > Security & Privacy. This menu also contains the settings for turning on Filevault.

While in Security & Privacy, make sure you choose to require a password after sleep or screen saver. This means that if you need to leave your laptop or desktop unattended, you can put it to sleep to lock the machine or set the screen to sleep after a certain amount of idle time. These are basics steps to secure your machine but will make a vast difference to the physical security of your Mac.

With my iMac I use a Kensington lock to physically lock the machine to my desk. Make sure any external hard drives for your mac are also formatted with encryption & set your encryption password on each of them. This means if any are lost or stolen, for example your time machine backup drive, they cannot be accessed by anyone but those with the encryption password. I encrypt all media including USB flash drives. It only takes seconds to mount them & enter a password, but it does mean that your data is always much more secure. Get into the habit of encrypting & you will massively reduce your exposure to hacking & identity theft.

Something else I always do is use a small roll of black insulation tape to cover up the webcams on my laptops and desktops. You can peel it off easily if you require the webcam for facetime or skype, but most of the time I tend to leave the cameras covered. The camera can be used for spying by both governments & criminals & there have been many cases of people being recorded on their webcams & then blackmailed. For the sake of a few pence, always have a roll of insulation tape and cover your webcams. You can even colour match the tape to your black Macbook/iMac bezel.

With regards to securing your iPhone my main advice would be to set a fast timeout on your automatic screen lock. Never leave your phone unlocked & make sure you get into the habit of locking the screen whenever you put the device down. Also make sure under your Touch ID & passcode options in iOS settings, that you opt to require the passcode immediately & that you opt to erase the device after 10 failed attempts. This means that in the event of loss or theft, the device will likely wipe itself before anyone can get your information & identity from the device. You can also use iCloud to remotely message & wipe your Mac’s & iOS devices.

Mac’s & iOS devices now increasingly rely on cloud services to sync & store your data. Ensure that you setup two factor authentication on your iCloud account, to make sure only someone with access to one of your physical devices can login to your iCloud account. Also, be aware that if iCloud is ever hacked & the encryption keys that Apple hold are accessed, your iCloud data can be decrypted. Ensure that anything you offer up to the cloud is information which isn’t personally identifiable or potentially damaging. The cloud is ideal for mundane documents and data which isn’t specifically personal, but if it is something you want to keep private, don’t ever upload it to cloud services. I’ll cover this more in my next post regarding securing yourself online.

Finally, never give out your encryption password, it is the key to all of your data. Never use it for anything but encrypting, never use it with an online provider. If you do need to make a note of the password, codify & hide it in a way that it can’t obviously be identified as a password. Always aim to physically keep hold of your devices. It is much harder to compromise your devices if they are always in your possession.

Never give out any passwords in email or over the phone. If someone calls asking for your account details, don’t give them out or ask them for their details and phone number & offer to call them back. You can then check the number & details online & call a verified number.

Finally keep software up to date. There are zero day exploits being discovered and utilised daily. You massively decrease your attack surface if you keep software, services & devices patched & up to date.

I will add to this post as & when I think of tips to help. If you have anything to add, please let me know in the comments. There will be loads that I have missed & I expect this post will constantly evolve. I’ve also tried to keep the post as straightforward and non technical as possible. I want the basics to be adopted by everyone, so I’ve left out the in-depth discussions on things like AES & encryption bit sizes.

To me, however, this has always been a selling point for Apple. The fact that you invest heavily in their hardware, but expect it to last as long as you want it to without ever breaking down has always appealed to me. My 2009 iMac has a 2.93Ghz dual core processor & 8GB of ram. I also opted for an uprated Nvidia GT120 in this iMac and for the most part I’ve never needed any more power. It’s still on the original hard drive & using SMART shows me that the HDD in the iMac has been in use for 32314 hours. That’s 1347 days of  actual use. I’m just now considering upgrading to an SSD & intend to remove the superdrive & have two hard drives in the iMac.

My wife has a 2011 Macbook pro & again with uprated ram to 8GB and an SSD, it just doesn’t warrant the upgrade. That laptop has also required component changing, such as a faulty keyboard after a water spillage & that can be achieved with cheap parts off the internet and a basic precision screwdriver kit. Repairability is super important to me, and the later Macbook pros & those with Retina displays lack the ability to repair & upgrade which put’s me off. I don’t want my ram soldered in at time of purchase. I don’t want pci-e SSD storage over standard & much cheaper SSD hard drives. I don’t want my batteries glued in place, requiring apple servicing and disposal of big parts of the laptop just to change the battery cells. If something breaks, I want to repair it. I don’t want to pay a fortune for apple techs to repair it with proprietary tools & methods. I certainly don’t want a disposable laptop & a huge price tag. If that is the price to get the laptops so impossibly slim, I’m sorry, I’m not interested.

So after being totally disappointed at the new Macbook’s, with their relatively non pro specs & removal of keys I use daily, I decided to save my money and buy one of the last true Macbook pros. I managed to source a mint condition, used, Macbook pro in 2012 specification for £550, a bargain when you think the new ones are starting at £1449 with a similar spec. This machine doesn’t have hard-wired ram. It has a SATA port so I can put in my own SSD, and the battery can be changed. Along with the Macbook, I have a Crucial 525GB SSD on the way & 16GB of brand new Crucial ram. Combined, that will be a pretty beast spec for Photoshop & web development work. And all for £720. A bargain for sure.

I’ll do a post when the machine is all ready to go & I’ll also post some benchmarks. Until Apple stops creating disposable appliances & starts making real computers again, I think most of their engineer customers & professional/hobbyist computer users will steer clear. Plenty of people I know wanted faster GPU’s, faster processors & oodles of RAM. Instead we got thinner, lighter & mediocre power wise. They should lose the Pro moniker on these laptops. They are really just casual consumer grade laptops at an astonishing price. Since Brexit became a thing in the UK, the spiralling pound has driven up the cost of tech & apple have added 20% to their hardware, making mediocre hardware even more expensive. I personally don’t think this will fly with consumers & they will be forced to change tack at some point.

I know a lot of people are switching to PC based machines. For a comparable price you can get a hell of a lot more hardware spec wise. For me, the iMac has always been a solid & dependable daily workhorse & my new Macbook Pro will allow me to break free of the desktop and work on the go. I do hope that Apple will change their minds & start catering to the Pro market, but in the meantime I’m sure most of us will just stick with what we have. Hardware & processors aren’t developing at the rate they once did, so it is much more feasible to stick with hardware for many years. I for one can attest to that, having used my iMac for 7 years solid.

What are your thoughts on the new Macbook Pro’s? Especially the model with the touch bar?

On our return the Macbook refused to startup. On pressing the power button it would make the startup chime, the grey apple screen would appear with the apple logo and then with a click of the hard drive the machine would shut down. This happened every time we tried to boot the laptop. The liquid had done damage. I inspected the Macbook where the drops had landed, mainly around the top right of the keyboard & the power button. I couldn’t see any signs of moisture at all. I suspected a fried logic board but refused to give up on the machine & testing.

I decided to lay it keyboard down on a towel and let it dry out for 12 hours. This did nothing. I then tried sitting the laptop in the sunlight to dry even further. Again nothing. I even pondered a huge bag or rice, but it seemed overkill for a few drops of tea. I thought long & hard how a few drops of liquid could have made it past the keyboard & backlight & down to the logic board. It was almost impossible due to the low amount of drips on the keyboard. At this point I decided that it must be a faulty keyboard or power button. As the laptop would boot a little surely the logic board must be OK.

I then tried booting the laptop holding the command key. It booted without issue, but as soon as I released the key it would shutdown. The shutdown was exactly the same as when you force shutdown the Macbook by holding the power button for 4 seconds. Eureka! It must be a short in the power button circuit. Probably due to the sugar content in the tea or corrosion caused by the moisture.

Next I opened up the Macbook, pulling out the radio board, battery, Superdrive and other bits getting in the way. I revealed the power button and noticed that the power button is part of the keyboard assembly and runs on a ribbon to the rest of the keyboard circuitry. As the keyboard was fried I decided to take a knife and slice off the ribbon for the power button. Surely if the short was in the button itself this would isolate it & allow the machine to boot. It didn’t. No big deal, the keyboard was thought to be faulty anyway so next I decided to disconnect the keyboard ribbon cable from the logic board, isolating the keyboard. As soon as I did this & reassembled the Macbook booted & worked perfectly. Due to the fact that I had disconnected the power button I had to start the Macbook up by shorting the power pads on the logic board. I did this with a screwdriver. I then replaced the bottom cover and had a fully working Macbook, without a keyboard & power button.

The power button wasn’t an issue as the Macbook always uses sleep as opposed to a cold shutdown. I plugged in an external keyboard and the Macbook was once again functional. What a result. We had gone from a destroyed Macbook to one with an obviously faulty internal keyboard. I enquired locally with Mac repair specialists who quoted between £200-£300 to replace the keyboard. Ridiculous prices, so I headed over to eBay and ordered a brand new official apple Macbook pro keyboard & brand new backlight for £24 delivered. The keyboard arrived next day and I set to work dismantling the Macbook. It’s a complicated laptop to dismantle, but only because of the sheer number of steps & screws involved. The keyboard assembly alone is held in by about 80 tiny little screws.

To disassemble you need to remove the bottom cover, followed by the battery. I then removed the hard drive mount, the superdrive & radio board, followed by the logic board fan, ribbon cables & logic board. There are model specific tear-downs over on ifixit so check those out for your model.

Removing the old keyboard & fitting the new one is time-consuming & fiddly, but not overly difficult. The hardest & most scary part for me was refitting the ribbon cable for the keyboard. It’s hard to get it seated properly, so I used a bit of sticky tape on the ribbon to create a tab, allowing me to pull the cable home in the bracket without kinking or bending it. Reassembly is the opposite of disassembly. When disassembling I’d advise that you keep components & their screws together so you know which screw belongs to which part. For the logic board screws I laid them out on a piece of card board in the same pattern as they came out of the logic board (see above picture), that way I could quickly see which hole to put them back into.

Once reassembled the MacBook worked perfectly. It had a brand new keyboard & backlight, which was all new & matte finished (the old one had gone shiny). This fix is well worth it if you think you have water damaged your MacBook, at least try disconnecting the keyboard to rule it out. If it boots, you can work with an external keyboard until you get around to replacing it. The Apple Macbook in question is 4 years old but perfectly good & used heavily, so this fix was a lifesaver. What’s more I managed to save a perfectly good bit of tech & a load of money in the process.