Although Apple is advertising its new iLife media package as “Microsoft Office for the rest of your life,” thus both giving the nod to the importance of Microsoft and marketing its own non-office-like products, I’m very excited about the new iLife package called GarageBand.
For years, SoundEdit 16, named after its 16-bit audio, was a great and inexpensive application for creating complex audio. It allowed for multiple tracks and effects and it had a great interface but Macromedia dropped support of it years ago. I wrote about 12 songs on it about 5 years ago and, sadly, I can no longer find them.
GarageBand looks even better as Apple figured out a way to allow Joe Schmoes like me to make original music from sampled tracks, microphone input, and other audio recordings. I have both the app and a new microphone on order. Apple’s mind-reading capabilities have become very sharp.
P.S. I like the metaphor of the Garage, where music and software are mythically developed, though a garage is mostly where its alliterative cousin garbage sits.
See, now, I certainly understand the lure of this program, and I’m sure that its great for all of you out there who make music.
However . . . now, to update iPhoto and iMovie, you’ve got to shell out $49? –This, in addition to the $129 we just paid for Panther?
I suppose GarageBand might be worth it . . . but the basic iApps (Tunes, Photo, Movie) have always been value-adds used in order to entice us to buy Macs & to shell out the cash to make the OS X annual update.
I think the decision to make people pay for iPhoto/iMovie updates is a bit disrespectful to those of us who have shown loyalty — and I think it is a bad business decision by Apple.
I think the only people who are going to pay for iLife ’04 will be those who are primarily buying it for GarageBand.