APC June 2022

"This country and its clever people have contributed much to the technology that has made possible many of the products and services people around the world use today." We’re not just avid consumers of tech, here in Australia. This country and its clever people have contributed much to the technology that has made possible many of the products and services people around the world use today. It’s not really a secret that Australian scientists have been delivering genuinely impactful advances, but it’s also not something that gets a lot of recognition – which is a shame because the stories are fascinating. So we’re doing that, here in APC. Starting this month Darren Yates embarks on a six-part journey through our proudest contributions to the modern world. Darren’s main reference point…

ASHAMPOO MUSIC STUDIO 2022 Music software to cut, organise and burn songs and audiobooks. Ashampoo Music Studio 2022 is powerful versatile music software to edit, cut and burn audio files. Audio disc ripping happens quickly and missing track information is filled in automatically based on an online database. Files can be burned or converted into different audio formats. The integrated audio editor enables users to modify or remove individual passages and allows them to split up tracks, e.g. MP3s, into individual parts, or recombine them with in-place snapping. Ashampoo Music Studio 2022 makes reorganising music libraries incredibly easy. Metadata can be modified, songs normalised, and tracks renamed based on customisable naming schemes, turning disorganised collections into well-formatted libraries. Mix Tape helps users create song mixes with cross-fading or custom pauses.…

“Championing technology doesn’t mean we’re unrelenting yes-men and -women, however, and APC aims to be as objective as possible in all our coverage.” APC is Australia’s oldest consumer technology magazine – having been consistently in print for forty years, since our first issue way back in May 1980 – and we take that heritage and responsibility very seriously. While our focus is obviously on the personal computer the very definition of the PC has changed and shifted markedly since the early 1980s. As such, we touch on many other areas of tech, too, from smartphones and apps to peripherals, accessories, and beyond. We have two goals: to find the best modern tech and to help you make the most of it. We’re also an open church in terms of platforms.…

An update coming to Microsoft 365 web apps will allow users to switch freely between work and personal accounts at last. Managing workloads when juggling a plethora of different email accounts can be a pain for the best of us. But with the latest update, Microsoft 365 users will no longer need to rely on finicky workarounds to switch contexts effectively. Users will now be able to sign into multiple Microsoft accounts in the same browser, and switch between these accounts without needing to sign out and back in or use private browser windows. According to Microsoft, this feature will benefit consultants who need to regularly access emails from different external companies, as well as consumer users switching between their corporate workloads and personal tasks…

Adoption of UE5 will mean different things for different studios, but the big themes are workflow streamlining and high-fidelity geometry and lighting. The 2020 Unreal Engine 5 reveal led with its new “micropolygon geometry system,” Nanite, and its “global illumination solution,” Lumen. With Nanite and Lumen, Epic says that developers can import film-quality 3D assets with “massive amounts of geometric detail” and set up dynamic lights without worrying about certain complex technical steps, especially those to do with optimisation. The engine handles the ‘making it run on our PCs’ part, or at least more of it. There are some features specific to open world games, too. One of those features is World Partition, which handles the on-the-fly loading and unloading of open worlds as players move through them.…

Despite all the hype behind Microsoft’s latest operating system, it seems to be struggling to get users to upgrade several months after its release. According to a survey by market analyst AdDuplex for April 2022, Windows 11 has had a growth of less than 0.4 percent month-over-month. This puts it at a 19.7 percent total user base, compared to 19.4 percent from last month. Meanwhile, Windows 10 21H2 has a total install base of 35 percent while Windows 10 21H1 is installed on an additional 26.4 percent of Windows computers. Another study from Lansweeper, an IT asset management company, found that there were more PCs in its study running Windows XP (1.71 percent) than Windows 11 (1.44 percent). However, it’s important to note that only 60,000 Windows 10 and 11…