I’ve just proven to myself, once again, that I don’t know everything, despite my vanity and imagined proficiency with certain things, specially with Macintoshes and Mac OS X. I’m coming across a lot of these things in my old age, and I’m learning to dial down my know-it-allness more and more these days. Like this little tip I discovered a couple of weeks ago.

Sometimes you come across the Apple Quicktime video file that has irritatingly low sound levels, and even if you jack up the volume as high as you can, it’s still not enough. Even if you raise the main volume levels via preferences, you still have to shush the room and stick your ear against the speaker to hear anything. Wouldn’t it be great if you could somehow just pump up the volume even more, just this once?

Actually, I found out that you can, on Macs using recent versions of Mac OS X.

It’s a simple trick, really.

All you need to do is hold down [shift] while you click on that volume icon, and the OS allows you higher levels of volume beyond the standard limits. Of course if you do this to an already loud sounding file you risk blowing out your speakers, but that’s your lookout. (Maybe that’s why this little trick is, as far as I know, undocumented. Of course, I’m of the “If all else fails, RTFM” school, so I might have just missed it and no one bothered to tell me.)

I just feel a bit dumb for not knowing the tip after all this time using Macs, and I suppose a whole bunch of you more seasoned Mac users out there know this already. I’ve had to, on occasion, load up the file in Final Cut Express, raise the gain then save back the file, just to make the thing louder. Sheesh. Knowing this would’ve saved me a whole lot of trouble. Haven’t had a chance to check if this Quicktime feature is available with the Windows version (and I’m sure someone will chime in and tell us), but it sure works great on OS X.

Just one of those little things that are nice to know, so if you didn’t before, well, now you do.