First experiments with GarageBand

Finally, I had some time to play a bit with GarageBand, the new program by Apple that is said to make creating music a lot easier. First of all, you can download my very first test here. It's a simple drum'n'base like tune, nothing special, and only constructed out of samples that are delivered with GarageBand.



About GarageBand itself: it is really easy to use. Although I have virtually no experience with doing music on the computer, I was able to create my own song very quickly. GarageBand allows totally unexperienced people to easily create own songs, by simply creating a new file and adding music sample from a pretty big high-quality collection of samples for all kind of music. GarageBand cares about the rest, e.g. transposing the samples and adapting their speed to the current file's speed.



But GarageBand also offers functionality for more professional musicians, e.g. it allows adding own samples by playing them via a software keyboard (which sucks, because you can only play it with the mouse) or a real (music, not computer) keyboard attached via MIDI. And last but not least, real instruments can be easily recorded and added. But since I neither own a MIDI keyboard nor some real music instrument (well, my brother has an e-bass, but my iBook doesn't provide proper input interfaces), I wasn't able to really test these advanced features so far.



Anyway, playing with GarageBand is fun, it's easy to use and the samples and software instruments that come with it are pretty good. The only thing that irritates me is that GarageBand closes when I close the currently open file. This is absolutely not OSX-like, the behaviour that I expect is that the file closes, while GarageBand keeps running, and I can then select "File -> New".