Need: HiFi Sound App.

Be interesting to know why GarageBand isn't sufficient for your purposes.

In any event, your dream of a "Manual-less" experience will die a hard death. Any advanced audio programs is, well... advanced.

If you want to do serious audio cleanup on stereo sources, Bias Peak and SoundSoap are worth looking at. There are also some worthy shareware programs, check versiontracker.com

If you want more than 2 tracks of audio, you need to look at one of the digital audio programs: Cubase, Logic, Digital Performer, ProTools. Most of these are available in several versions. They all suppport "plug ins" of various kinds for filtering, time-domain, amplitude and frequency-domain effects. Some have plug ins for noise reduction. Some of the plug ins cost extra.

It also depends what you mean by cleaning up. A recorded hum, or the drums leaking into the vocal track, are problems with recording technique that are largely not fixable after the fact.

You will also need to consider whether you need to improve your audio interface, microphones or outboard equipment in order to get better results. (you haven't given us any details on these)

Recommendation: Go to the library and get some books and/or magazines on recording technique. Good mags to read are: Sound on Sound, Recording, Electronic Musician, Keyboard, Future Music, Computer Music and Mix (roughly in that order of preference). You can make a huge difference in recorded sound quality just by following good recording practices.

well garageband is by far the easiest to use...but i do agree that the mic recording is lacking as is any audio input recording....I would recomend Logic for what you should use...its not simple but if you need good recording and want to use the different fliters and such you are going to have to read some manuals...Logic is an AWSOME prog and works great...others I would recomend would be "Live Lite" or if you REALLY want to mean business use "Reason".. anyone that does much recording for bands or anything like that would tell you Reason (once you get the hang of the damn thing) is the best... also make sure you have a pretty good mic and run it through a preamp to get the best recording...check out M-Audio they have alot of good stuff

sjpetry said:

GarageBand is not sufficient for my microphone work. I would like the program to have filters for cleaning up the audio and adding effects.

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I'm not exactly sure what you're asking, but if you're saying you don't like the sound quality that you're getting recording through your mic into garage band then you need a better mic, not different software.

A couple of points:

Reason doesn't support audio recording.

Garageband supports AU plug-ins, and supports audio recording up to CD standard, you might want to simply buy a couple of decent FX plug-ins.

Logic is excellent, but is total overkill if all you want is audio editing, the learning curve is almost vertical for a beginner...

Protools LE (either the m-box or the m-powered version) is pretty straightforward and very powerful, and is effectively an all in one solution. I would recommend it.

If you only want stereo, I suggest BIAS peak (which does come free with Final Cut and DVD Studio Pro.

Others comments about mics and pre-amps are well founded, as your recordings are only ever going to be as good as the original source and signal chain.

wrxguy said:

Reason (once you get the hang of the damn thing) is the best...

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Reason doesn't record anything, I wish it did but.....

I think you should stick with Garageband, learn how to ue it to it's maximum potential, and invest in some good hardwear, like mics and pre-amps, and whatnot. Also Bias Soundsoap is great for cleaning up signals.

quigleybc said:

and invest in some good hardwear

Click to expand...

Oops, not hard wear, hardware....

Buy Peak.
First of all it will allow you to eq, add effects, edit, normalize, etc. A very nice program that i could not live without.

sjpetry said:

What I was meaning when I said I wasn't happy with GarageBands vocal support was that the program doesn't have much in the support for mics. In GarageBand their is no way to EQ the mics.(That I know of).

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Hit the + button, choose 'Real Instrument' > 'Show All' > 'Vocals' > select a vocal preset > hit 'Create'.

Now, record something, double click on that track (on the left hand side, where the name of the track is). You should recognise the box that pops up. Click the arrow beside 'Details...', make sure the 'Equaliser' box is checked and that it is set to 'Manual'. Now click on the pen next to the Equaliser drop-down menu and you have a simple EQ.

So, there is a way to EQ your recorded tracks, it's just buried and somewhat limited. I guess it's just Apple's way of making everything seem simple. Personally, I find Garageband to be an over-simplistic audio application, but, on the flip-side, most of the stuff in iPhoto goes over my head