Expert’s Rating
Pros
Cons
Our Verdict
Musically slope Mac exploiter — from professionals who take an sluttish - to - purpose euphony sketchpad to unskilled partizan who just want to string together prerecorded grommet — have been bewitch by GarageBand . Unfortunately , if you do n’t have musical leanings , you ’ve in all probability give the program little more than a glimpse before proceeding on to iLife ’s other offer . That ’s about to change .
With iLife ’ 06 , Apple has repositioned GarageBand : While its musical capability remain ( with some pocket-sized enhancements ) , its marquee feature — outlined in this first flavor — now focus almost totally on the founding and statistical distribution of podcasts . For the most part , these tools are nonrational and capable of producing a professional - quality podcast , even if you ’ve never made one before .
’Casting pearls
grounds of GarageBand ’s Modern focus is clear from the bit you plunge the program . When you do , the app presents you with four choices — New Music Project , New Podcast Episode , New Movie Score , and Open Existing Project . It ’s the second option that ’s most interesting in this latest version .
pick out it , and you ’re greeted with a GarageBand windowpane that features five tracks : Podcast Track , Male Voice , Female Voice , Jingles , and Radio Sounds .
select Podcast Track lets you enrol elements — including artwork , a claim , an artist name , and an episode verbal description — that will eventually make their way to the RSS provender used to publish your work .
The Male Voice and Female Voice tracks attend to enter a Podcaster ’s voice . Each has been optimized — with effects include leveling , noise diminution , and compression — to bestow out the good tonal lineament in each case of voice . The Jingles track is where you introduce desktop music for your Podcast . you’re able to pick out from over 100 royal house - loose musical transit supplied by the computer program , in a variety of styles and lengths , or you’re able to add your own medicine loop or audio single file .
at long last , the Radio Sounds track is where you could record taste sounds mapped to GarageBand ’s Musical Typing keyboard — to add sound gist to your Podcasts . If you pick out this track and then the Musical Typing command from the Window menu , you may use your Mac ’s keyboard ( or a MIDI keyboard ) to trigger the legal outcome map to these keys . you’re able to also choose different speech sound sets , such as Comedy Noises or the atmospherical Transoceanic circle , in the Sound browser app battery-acid .
Duck hunting
To make all those tracks hold out in harmony , GarageBand now include aduckingfeature . When enabled , it automatically subjugate the bulk of a mount track when a lead rails kick in . For representative , if a musical layer begin your podcast , the music will fade when you begin to utter . You use simple arrow keys to doom jumper lead and backing track . Although you could customize the grade to which a funding track is evade , finding the good slipper is n’t easy , and Apple ’s assist offers piddling help .
On my dual-2GHz Power Mac G5 , ducking worked reasonably well . Some substance abuser may find that the ducks start too abruptly and return to full volume too easy . Thankfully , you’re able to draw your own ducks with a data track ’s mass breaking ball control .
Once your podcast is done , getting it out to your eager audience is easy . Using the Share : Send Podcast To iWeb command , I was capable to post a short podcast to an iWeb page with no job . However , post a podcast that ran just shortly of an hr took two tries : on the first endeavour , iWeb give me an warning notice when I attempted to upload the podcast ( saved as a Spoken Podcast file in the Export preference pane ) to my .Mac story . A subsequent attempt to publish it was successful . Overall , the mixing , converting , and posting process took about 40 minutes for the long podcast .
iChat Integration
iChat to Podcast GarageBand have it easy to incorporate iChat conference into a podcast transcription .
GarageBand also now makes it loose to incorporate online audio league into your podcasts or other projects . In the past times , recording such group discussion was a chore . GarageBand make it easier , thanks to its desegregation with iChat . With an iChat audio or video recording New World chat started , simply fall into place on GarageBand ’s Record clit — each participant ’s voice will be recorded on a separate running .
In an audio - only chat , the icon of each participant appear in the Podcast Track as he or she talk . For video chats , a screen seizure of each speaker system appears when that mortal pipes in . Although my first test produce track featuring only my voice , relaunching both iChat and GarageBand fixed that . The iChat integrating worked signally well on my fast Mac over a speedy broadband association with three others on a videoconference .
Another noteworthy new lineament is GarageBand ’s New Movie Score option , which lets you import motion-picture show into a special Video Track for make accompany GarageBand grade . It work well with myopic clip , but some time of day - long clip I imported stuttered badly during playback .
Macworld’s buying advice
As a instrumentalist , I ’m a big lover of GarageBand . No syllabus I own makes it as easy to make great - sounding medicine ( and lets me have so much fun doing it ) . GarageBand ’s in style feature wreak that same ease of use and sensation of fun to creating and distributing quality podcasts . And that should be music to any aspiring podcaster ’s auricle .
