Mini-Review on Garageband
- February 11, 2004
- 3 comments
I already received iLife from Amazon this morning! Free shipping and it comes in just over 24 hours. You can’t beat that. Anyway… I diverge.
Garageband rocks! No pun intended. It is so amazingly easy to create a song, it’s almost magical. It comes with a ton of loops that could keep anyone of any kind of musical persuasion happy. You can adjust individual track volume, cross-fading, etc. You can edit loops, cutting out bits you don’t want and splicing in other bits. One thing it doesn’t have is effects, like Soundtrack does. Even so, you can create some quite good stuff. Listen to this sample I threw together in literally a few minutes. It’s the export of what you see in the above picture.
There are some quirks and glitches with Garageband, however. There’s a sound distortion that happens every now and then when I add new tracks. To get around it, you simply select another track above the one you added and it works fine. Don’t ask me why that fixes it, it just does. There are some display bugs too. When clicking the play button, the main tracks section starts scrolling even though your tracks may not extend wider than the window. It corrects itself though and scrolls back during playback.
Other than these quirks, Garageband is a really, really nice and extremely fun program to use. It’s so easy to use, a small kid could easily make a chart-topper.
Oops. I was wrong. Garageband DOES have effects. You select the segment, click on the Info button and there you go. Effects include such staples as Gate, Compressor, Echo, Reverb and Equalizer. There are also quite a few others.
Chris
February 13, 2004
What do you mean by playback errors? How much RAM did she originally have in her iMac? I have 512 MB. Like I mentioned, I get some playback errors too. Sometimes the bass will snap and pop while it’s in playback. Most of the time, if I either select the track above the newest one or click on the desktop and then back on to Garageband, it gets fixed.
Russ
My wife really loves Garageband too. The only problem she has had with it so far, is that her 800 MHz iMac was running into playback errors with certain instruments. I was able to take care of most of that by adding another 256 MB of ram.
I have tried it out a few times myself, and in many ways, it is much easier to use than Soundtrack. I still can’t make music very well with either one though.
Grrrrrr.