Mini-Review: Garmin Training Center for Mac

At the end of January Garmin finally released the Mac version of their Training Center software for managing sessions on the Edge 305 cycling / running GPS device. It was a long time from announcement to delivery. In the meantime since I bought the 305, I've been using the Windows version to archive the data, and a freeware Mac program called Load My Tracks to turn the data into Google Earth tracks. I wrote about the 305 and these programs in a recent post. I was unable to use the Windows version under Parallels due to problems with the USB interface to the 305, but I did use it occasionally on Windows XP.

The Mac version of Training Center is essentially similar to the Windows version, with a few differences to note. It works well enough, but there are a few oddities that are annoying; the Windows version shares these issues.

Good Stuff

The graphics on the Mac version are nicer. The about box credits SM2DGraphView by Snowmint Creative Solutions, so I presume this is the graphing engine that does the work.

The Mac version just generally looks and feels better. More fit-and-finish polish. Even the map display is rendered better.

Minor Flaws

There is no progress indicator--just a spinning beach ball--when the program communicates with the GPS device over USB. You just have to remind yourself when you launch the application that it hasn't crashed, it's just busy for a while.

There is also no way to select tracks on the device for download; it seems to get everything every time. This would make it impossible for two people to use the GPS and keep their workouts separately on their own computers. In a similar vein, the data is stored in a file located at ~/Library/Garmin/Training Center/Training Center.gtc. This means you cannot keep more than one data set, nor place the data where you want it.

The program and the GPS together do not consistently identify activity types correctly. I use it for running and cycling, but so far I don't see a pattern to when the program selects the little runner icon versus the little cyclist icon. There is also a little skier icon that it automatically selected for the first couple of sessions when I had the GPS in the car. There seems to be no way to manually assign the activity type, although you can manually organize each workout in folders that you name with types.

Although you can export data to an XML-based "tcx" format, you need a different program such as Load My Tracks to get the data into Google Earth or Google Map form. (See my previous article.)

Mini-Review: Roxio / Sonic Solutions CD Spin Doctor

I may as well just say it up front: This is the most unreliable, crash-prone, unstable, frustrating, piece of crap application on my computer. If it weren't for the fragility of the application, it would be a good tool for what it's designed for (easily digitizing vinyl or taped albums and easily splitting them into separate tracks that are added to the iTunes library). But although it does what it promises when it works, the fatal flaw is that it crashes if you look at it wrong, which means you have to save your progress after every click or two, and force quit the app many times as you proceed. It's just atrocious, and Roxio's support forums seem to have no answer; the app feels like abandonware. It is bundled with Toast and with the ADS Instant Music analog audio capture box that I bought at Macworld Expo.

On the positive side, if one were to pretend that the application did not crash, and just look at the UI and workflow, it's nice and clean and simple with only a few real flaws. The process is straightforward: (flaws noted in italics)

1. Create a new recording session. (Input settings are not remembered across launches of the app, so you must select the USB device each time, click the "Play Input Through Speakers" each time so that you can monitor the recording, etc. And with the constant crashing, you may need to re-launch for each recording.)
2. Click the record button.
3. Click the stop button when the end of the album is reached. Alternatively you can set a time limit from a limited number of predefined time intervals.
4. Click the Auto Define magic wand button to auto-locate the individual tracks based on dead space between them.
5. Tweak the track endpoints. (There is insufficient zoom-in resolution to nail down the start and end points with quite enough accuracy, so you end up with a split-second of dead air before a track starts and after it ends. In addition, the track boundary is partially obscured by a pretty drop-shadow, which makes it harder to see where the boundary really is. And if you play the audio, this is where the app is so eager to freeze up, so it is a painfully frustrating and slow process to adjust the track boundary and then listen to see if it correct.)
6. Edit the track names. (As will be seen in the next step, it turns out this often causes the iTunes export to fail, so don't bother.)
7. Click the iTunes button to send the tracks to iTunes. (If you gave the tracks names with certain non-alphanumeric characters, the export will fail without saying why. Since it is so common to have apostrophes, hyphens, commas, etc. in track names, the track naming feature is rendered useless. You have to do all that in iTunes, whose interface for it is better anyway. But that introduces more pain into the process in iTunes, because it forces you to do each side of an album separately; otherwise you get two of each track title (e.g., "Untitled Track 01") and you may have to listen and look at the record sleeve to identify out which is from which side of the album. The export conversion selection is either MP3 or AAC (the default is AAC), but you have no choice of bit rate, and the setting is not remembered later. So if you want to create MP3s you must remember to select it every time, or you will wind up with AAC files.)
8. Finally, in iTunes, edit the track names and go find some album art. (The Spin Doctor program is arrogant enough to contaminate each of your tracks' metadata comment field with an advertisement that the track was created by Spin Doctor. So you will want to delete those.)

So there you have it. A useful program with a good workflow, utterly destroyed by total unreliability.

The recording dialog box.

The main window, where you define tracks.