Apple's Rock Star Extraordinaire, Clark Schroeder, brought the house down at our April Main Meeting! GarageBand 2 is an amazingly powerful (and inexpensive) music creation tool and Clark dug deep into its features to show how we don't even need to be musicians to use it.
The original GarageBand included a "virtual keyboard" with which you could plink out your tunes one note at a time using the mouse — kind of a pain. What you really needed was a MIDI instrument that would play more like the real thing. GarageBand 2 includes a "musical keyboard" that turns your querty keyboard into a piano, with white and black keys and a variety of controls. So if you have GB2 and haven't sprung for a MIDI keyboard, or aren't (revealed below) the winner of the keyboard at the Main Meeting, this feature lets you get started creating tunes in a more realistic way.
You build an arrangement with a combination of loops and live tracks, which can include MIDI instruments or real voices. GB2 comes with a ton of loops including drums, horns, pianos, guitars, and so on, but now you can create your own loops too. Loops can be synthesized or sampled from real instruments and each of them can be further modified by applying filters. You can also get additional professionally created loops from Apple. Some are free with your .Mac membership, or there are four huge Jam Packs you can purchase. Loops you get from Apple are royalty-free. Other loops will also work with GB2, but you should check the license if you intend to use your finished masterpieces commercially.
Other new features in GB2 include the ability to record up to 8 live tracks simultaneously (though you'll need to buy audio input hardware to do it), and real-time musical notation of your tracks. GarageBand 2 can display your performance in musical notation while you record it, and you can edit your performance in the same way. Unfortunately, printing your score does not seem to be an option in this version.
GarageBand 2 is included in iLife '05, and is available now. Clark told us that it runs best on a 1 GHz system or better running Mac OS X 10.3 or newer. Slower processors, particularly, might cause less-than-realtime performance of some feature. And the more RAM, the better.
dBug is the proud owner of a new Mac mini and Clark filled us in on all the little details, but you can check it out at the Resource Center if you missed the Main Meeting. Here's a photo of it in use:
Clark took a page from Steve's presentation playbook and pulled out "One More Thing" — a sneak preview of Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger)! With over 200 new features, this version is a sure thing upgrade. Just to hit the high spots:
- Will run on any Macs that have FireWire, but since it has enhanced 64-bit capabilities, it will thrive on a G5
- Spotlight, the new desktop search feature "googlizes" your Mac, searches content as well as titles
- Dashboard, Desk Accessories of the future on Exposé steroids
- Smart stuff everywhere including Smart Mailboxes in Mail, Smart Folders in Finder, Smart Groups in Address Book, Smart Font Collections...
- Mail supports message creation in HTML format, can be searched with Spotlight, includes a slideshow feature
- Safari supports RSS feeds (Really Simple Syndication)
- QuickTime 7 has higher-quality H.264 video, zero-configuration streaming, and other new features
- Automator - takes on repetitive tasks, scripting without knowing AppleScript
- VoiceOver - reengineered text-to-speech and a spoken description of what is happening on screen
- The Graphing Calculator is back (MIA since Mac OS 9)
- iChat AV supports up to 10-person audio chat and 4-person video chats
Coming up at our May Main Meeting are presentations by dBug's Curtis Snow on Podcasting, and MacRadio's Omaha Sternberg on online radio. We'll be learning more about Tiger at our June Main Meeting, but if you just can't wait, make sure you check out May's Mac OS X SIG meeting.
Who won the MIDI keyboard in the raffle? Curtis Snow who just added "becoming a musician" to his To Do list. Other lucky winners walked away with OmniWeb, Take Control: Making Music with GarageBand and Recording with GarageBand, and lots of other dBug goodies.
