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Tech News and Commentary
Dave and the team discuss Walmart Plus, Apple Music and battery life, Google Assistant supporting new devices, and more.
Joe in Hazleton, Pennsylvania listens online and asked: “I’m a local musician and I would like to continue to play at home and record. Not necessarily for online, but for myself. I’d like to know what a good microphone would be for an acoustic guitar and I’d like to know about a good outboard interface for making recordings. Looking at the Scarlett from Focusrite. I think that might be a good one. Could you recommend a good microphone for around $250 and a nice interface that I could use?”
Joe, a Shure SM57 may work for you, it’s a popular and inexpensive cardioid microphone. It’s unidirectional and generally popular as an instrument microphone. An SM57 will cost you around $100.
The Rohde (pronounced Road-uh) NT5 may work for you as well, it’s also unidirectional, meant for studio use and it will cost you about $220.
The Scarlett, in particular the Solo, would probably be a good choice if you want something that will allow you to record yourself and a guitar without breaking the bank.
A 2-channel Behringer U-Phoria UMC202HD may work for you as well, but it’s overall similar and it’ll cost you a little more at around $200.
A Zoom UAC 2 will raise the price a little bit more to $250, but it’s also a solid 2-channel option and we have experience with their products and they seem very durable.
Greg in Manchester, Tennessee listens Online and asked: “Question about the new Edge browser. I got a notification on my computer that I need to update my Internet Explorer browser. I’m just wanting to know more about what you know about the Edge browser and why it’s better.”
Greg, once upon a time IE accounted for about 95% of the traffic websites would see, these days as you’re experiencing, even Microsoft wants off of it.
Microsoft is still supporting IE at least until Windows 10 loses support, but they’re not really keeping it updated to where it can compete with modern browsers. IE doesn’t support many standards that every other browser does, so it’s not rare to run into pages that just will not work under IE.
Most sites – but also web-based services – are not bothering to support IE anymore because the user base is understood to have shrunk to pretty small levels, but also because it is genuinely expensive to support it. That lack of compatibility with modern standards means that some things that work for every other browser will not work with IE and it might need to add lots of brittle workarounds or even duplicate features.
Edge on the other hand is reskinned Chromium, the engine that Google’s Chrome uses. Chrome is the current standard browser on computers and the one that has the most widespread support. That means that switching over to Edge will pretty much guarantee that most sites around will work with your computer.
At the moment, if you want to stick with IE11, you should be good. It’s still getting security updates, but your overall online experience will be worse.
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