So, I finally went and bought iLife, or as I call it, GarageBand. I may, at some point, make use of iPhoto, but mainly I considered it spending $50 on a well-reviewed entry-level sequencer/loop/recording app.
I haven’t yet had much time to truly test its capabilities by hooking up my keyboards to it or recording anything from them, but it looks fairly capable for something that’s $50 bucks.
It clearly rewards those who like dance music with lots of loops. In fact, much like the people who produce the music Schnippy listens to, you need not have any musical talent. Just throw some loops on there, maybe, if you’re clever, do a bit of editing.
GarageBand keeps you out of trouble by adjusting everything to your current tempo and key. You can transpose, shorten, or loop a sound you put in. However, you can’t elongate, slow, or speed up a sound. Editing controls quantize to the nearest measure, to 16th, but no triplets.
How easy is it? Well, the last time I saw the inside of a recording studio or did sequencing or audio editing on a Mac was 12 years ago, and I did this:
That consists of me using the mouse-activated keyboard and the rest messing with loops. I tried creating a loop using Apple’s free Loop creation SDK, but GarageBand sped it up horribly on import, and trying to import it again lost the file. If anybody knows how to uninstall and reinstall a loop, let me know.
That took me maybe 3 or 4 hours, much of it just messing around with the library.
So it’s great for hobbies. I suspect as I get into it I’ll find out that it’s really capable for something that costs $50 bucks, but too limiting.
Just what I need, more things to spend my money on.
P.S. Go easy on the downloads, I don’t have unlimited bandwidth.
Sandy Smith 