iBook 800 G3 for GarageBand?

MacHarne · May 14, 2005

With the onset of the further $100 student discount from Apple over the next couple of weeks, I have decided to get a 12" PB to use for a while. I am going to give my iBook to my parents (and a blessing that this will become their "switching" motivation).

My father is interested in using this machine for GarageBand. Since I do not have iLife 04 or 05 on this machine (the iBook from my signature), I was wondering how well it would run. I can get iLife 05 easily enough with my student discount, so acquiring the software isn't a problem. But I am concerned that this laptop (when equipped with a USB input device) may be slow for my father's music creation needs.

Please let me know of your experiences of running GarageBand on G3 systems, particularly the iBook. I thank you in advance for your help and advice. Also if there are any specific products I should look into, I'd be glad to hear of the recommendations.

5300cs · May 14, 2005

Honestly it's most likely going to be slow. I ran it on my G4 550 TiBook and it was okay but slow.
I wouldn't expect any knock-down fast performance.
Don't just take my word for it, though.

thequicksilver · May 14, 2005

I ran Garage Band from iLife '04 on a G3 900MHz iBook for a few months. It was OK. It was able to cope with pretty much as many loops as you could throw at it, but with software instruments it simply couldn't cope. This with was with the maximum 640MB of memory.

Given that your father would be using it with his instrument, I'd seriously advise you to give it a miss.

AdamR01 · May 15, 2005

I have the exact same iBook and if you want to record you pretty much need an external hard drive because the 4200rpm drive could never really cope with recording for me. Even then I couldnt record one or 2 instruments without the computer saying there was not enough cpu power.

zach · May 15, 2005

Software instruments are a no go.

With GarageBand 1, things are very difficult, it's hard to use more than two tracks at once.

You may have a bit more luck with GarageBand 2. In GarageBand 2 you can lock the tracks, saving the data to the harddrive and removing that track to be "computed on the fly".

Either way, a new iBook or PowerBook would be MUCH better suited to the task (or any G4 for that matter, AltiVec makes a huge difference in GarageBand), but it really all depends on your level of patience.

MacHarne · May 15, 2005

I've been reading the documentation for GarageBand on Apple's site and I haven't found a clear definition of "software instrument".

Does that mean an external device that is being input or does it mean an instrument being manipulated via the computer keyboard? Providing more detail here, my father wants to use one of the M-Audio USB-Midi keyboards for recording.

Thanks for the replies. I was fearing this iBook wasn't going to be enough. I have used GarageBand on a 1GHz G4 before and it handled it without serious lag.

KevRC4130 · May 16, 2005

MacHarne said:
I've been reading the documentation for GarageBand on Apple's site and I haven't found a clear definition of "software instrument".

Does that mean an external device that is being input or does it mean an instrument being manipulated via the computer keyboard? Providing more detail here, my father wants to use one of the M-Audio USB-Midi keyboards for recording.

Thanks for the replies. I was fearing this iBook wasn't going to be enough. I have used GarageBand on a 1GHz G4 before and it handled it without serious lag.

The program has a number of already made tracks of all sorts of instruments, and you simply insert it into the song. I am pretty sure this is what they mean by software instruments.

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iBook 800 G3 for GarageBand?

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