Did you ever plug in a headphone? Then the same happens like on the iPhone: The Computer is muted and the headphone makes the music. I hate that! Why? Because I am so fussy and want to spare my hardware. Especially jacks are sensitive and easily getting loose. So it would be so much better having a headphone connected, put it aside and still enjoy the iMac’s speaker sound as well. There is no option anywhere in the preferences, so I have to accept this. The only solution I know is getting an external sound card.

Phase change

So I did, and I am the proud owner of the external Terratec Phase X24 Firewire audio card. Really great device, and you know what? I can connect a headphone with still having sound everywhere. YES!

Record

I love making music and hopefully you have subscribed my audio podcast. To create my sounds I mainly use software like Record in combination with Reason. Record is so great in connecting audio hardware with multiple inputs and outputs.

Combine in, combine out

For my latest song I needed to record my voice while playing the music inside Record. That masterpiece software is able to do that, but my USB microphone was not in there. Checking out all the devices, I noticed for the first time, that Record combines audio devices with inputs and outputs.

Shit happens, my PhaseX24 and the Samson GoMic was not listed up in combination.

Got a Mac? Do it yourself!

Damn, yeah! I am a Mac user, so that’s no big deal. I will create my own device!

I have just opened the Audio and MIDI settings, and voila, there is the add button. Give it a name and click all devices I want to have in there. Made a check on PhaseX24 and one Samson USB GoMic, that’s it! Restarting Record, running to preferences and there it is: my PhaseX24+GoMic device.

Pricing

In my humble opinion the price for this update is very much to much. Some months ago, I just bought the update from 3 to 4. If the performance increases, then it is some bucks worth, but this time…

The update

They offered a free v5 trial for 30 days. Thanks, that’s great! But using that in makes your v4 operating systems converted to v5. Guess, what happens when the 30 days are over! Right, your VM’s are dead until you buy the update. There is no way back to 4, except for you made a copy of that images before. Ok, the installer warns about that, but is it fair, yet? Why is there no option, that a copy will be created by the installer itself?

Alternatives

Are there alternatives for OS X for another virtualization software? The first application I had in mind was VMWare Fusion. They offer a free trial, too. So I went out to their website to grab my personal copy. Good thought, but that was only a idea. They force you to fill out forms with lots of your personal data. That is not the way I want to get a free trial!

So I went further and remembered some news I read about Sun’s Virtual Box. That is the way how it should be! Free download, free ware, full of rich features and available on Windows, OS X and Linux.

Virtual Box

First of all, I must tell you, that I am very impressed of that piece of software! It is tiny, easy to use and brings all functionality you need and supports all notable kinds of modern OS in 32 bit and 64 bit!

Approaching

In this article I will compare Virtual Box against Parallels 5. I tested several features and performance. The operating systems used are Windows 7 in 32 bit and Debian 5 in 32 bit – both given 32 MB Video RAM with activated 3D and 2D accerlation. Main memory is set to 256 MB.

Performance

Performance and speed is really important when using virtual machines – at least for me. And the winner is: Virtual box! It does not slow down my Mac with 2 GB RAM like Parallels does. It even starts and shuts down very much faster and it seems my harddisk is not tortured that much. Virtual Box is optimized to run multiple instances, and I think that brings the speed.

With performance at all I mean

• Pausing, resuming and sleep like hibernation
• Harddisk usage
• RAM usage left for Host OS
• OSX response (keyboard, mouse, usage of apps)
• Guest OS response (keyboard, mouse, usage of apps)

What’s missing?

Virtual Box is not that rich as Parallels, but here is a list of features which are not yet available in Virtual Box:

• Drag and Drop files between Host and Guest OS, but you can share folders!
• Application folder of Guest OS integrated in Host OS.
• No bootcamp partitions.
• Seamless mode (guest OS window integration into host OS) only works on primary monitor!
• Keyboard input is interpreted as “PC”-keyboard.

Conclusion

The speed of Virtual Box is much better, at least on my hardware. I never used bootcamp and I am a little bit sad, that the seamless mode does not work on my secondary monitor. Also I am missing the drag and drop, but get used to the shared folders quickly.

Parallels got deinstalled!