GarageBand Thoughts

I finally got a chance to play with GarageBand, both on a reasonably powerful G4 laptop and my year-old iBook G3. All complaints of poor performance on anything less than a blazing new G5 are well founded, it seems.

It’s late, so I’ll be terse. GarageBand is, barring its resource requirements, perfect for doing what it intends to do: bringing easy digital music making to Apple’s target “home creative” user base. It’s friendly, it’s simple, it’s got a polished sample library, et cetera et cetera.

I thought, as a semi-semi-semi-pro musician, that I might enjoy some of its features and use it for occasional recording flourishes. But between 13 second lags when dragging a sample to the song layout and a general feeling of “preset lock” I can’t ever see using it. It just feels like everything that comes out of the app will sound inextricably like it, much like one can spot a Photoshop filter from miles away. A creative user can overcome this, of course, and I’m sure people will make great stuff with GarageBand. But for the kind of music I make it just doesn’t jive as an inspirational tool. So off my hard drive it goes, and its 2GB library of proprietary format samples with it.

If I was a more traditional musician it’d be the business, though. Different strokes. That’s all.

UPDATE: Booga wanted to know if I still felt that GarageBand is competitive with other loop-stretching programs like Acid. The answer is “yes.” GB can do what Acid does, and a drum loop intended for 110BPM still sounds good at 160BPM (the first thing I tried). The app is definitely an Acid-killer, but can’t lay a finger on loop-based tools like Live.