Product Reviews

When GarageBand first appeared, it revolutionised music creation, as it took a hugely complex process and made it extraordinarily easy. GarageBand 3, the biggest update in the new iLife '06 suite, has improved its abilities on home turf and also broadened its horizons.

As well as handling recorded and Midi music creation and editing, it now has features for creating podcasts and movie scores. It has to be said that most of the development work for this version has gone into its iLife suite integration rather than in its core music-specific creation and production tools, but Apple has improved stability and usability across the board.

The software feels a little more responsive in general, which will please existing users who have been frustrated with its performance. Having said that, it still needs a large amount of memory to do much, so be prepared to get yourself at least 1GB of RAM - preferably 2GB if you're planning on doing a lot of music production.

The interface is largely the same as far as music is concerned, but there's now a Media Browser panel to help you browse and import existing media. The application's new features mean this extends to images and videos as well as audio tracks, and you can preview both audio and visual content in the Media Browser panel. When opened, this appears in the right of the GarageBand window. It does steal a fair bit of space from the main score area, but it can be opened and closed at will.

Adding pre-recorded tracks to a score is now very simple: just drag and drop them from the Media Browser, and then crop, add effects and jam over the top to your heart's content. Whether you're making a dub remix of a chart hit or layering tracks over something you recorded separately, this makes mixing even more fun. And as long as your Mac is up to it, you'll be working in real time. Apply an effect to an audio track and it'll take effect instantly.

GarageBand will work with any form of audio input that the Mac recognises, from the built-in mic on most Macs to the iSight's microphone to

ADVERTISEMENT

high-end audio-capture devices - even iChat conversations.

If you enable the Ducking feature, the volume level of any existing audio track is dropped while you speak and then restored automatically when you stop. This trick alone will help make GarageBand a winner for podcasting production, but it goes much further than this. With a Podcast score, you get two predefined voice tracks (using the Male Voice and Female Voice effects from the Podcasting Effects suite), a Jingles track and a Midi-based Radio Sounds track for all those wacky sound effects you may (or may not) want.

If you drag in photos from the iPhoto-sourced list to the podcast track, you'll produce a slide show movie form of podcast instead of an audio-only one. This is a logical extension of audio blogging. If you're working on a podcast track and you add a video you'll be asked if you want to change the podcast track to a video track instead, which is essentially the same thing, just with video rather than still pictures.

Alongside podcast production, GarageBand now has features for movie score production. In this format, drag one or more videos into the Video Track and start adding your music to the footage. In some ways, this method of working feels like an audio-focused form of iMovie's soundtrack features. GarageBand will split a video's audio into a separate track for free-form treatment, while the footage is shown as a series of keyframes along the Timeline. You can chop up and move the audio, apply sound effects and filters, and more, although your video editing is limited to adding or deleting complete clips.

You publish your podcasts exclusively through the suite's newest addition, iWeb. If you want to use a different web publishing tool, you'll have to either retrieve the exported track afterwards or export it to iTunes and use it from there.

The iTunes export creates the same track content at the same 64Kbits/sec AAC, but it doesn't provide the RSS code or put it into a web page for you. And, yes, you'll have to jump through other hoops if you want MP3-based audio instead: Apple is using GarageBand to cement the AAC format, although viewers need to use QuickTime or AAC-compatible players to access your content.

If you're interested in podcasting, GarageBand is a must-have application, even with the slight caveat about the AAC-focused production. This release has turned podcast production from a complex and technically demanding task into something almost embarrassingly simple. It isn't just podcasters and musicians who should use this: GarageBand is now as compelling a toy for movie editors as it is for anyone else.