Composition Tool

[cliffardo2001]

I attended the MacWorld conference and Keynote and was quite thrilled to hear about GarageBand. Like many, I was worried it was going to be a watered down version of Soundtrack which, for a musician like myself, is not a very useful creatve tool. I am new to digital music production and have only seen a demo for Logic at a convention. What I am confused about is how people can say it's not a useful tool for composition, or even go so far as to say it's a useless application? I understand that you can't import/export MIDI. However, I do know that you can input music with a MIDI keyboard or even a USB/audio interface and cut, paste, move around, change key and individual notes (at least with the MIDI), tempo, and dynamics. And I should mention that the samples sounded beautiful (I got to experiment with GarageBand at the MacWorld conference). Like I said, digital music production is very new to me so something like GarageBand is a great place to start. I gasped when Steve gave the price of iLife '04 because I was probably going to spend over 200 bucks on the Logic Audio Big Box. So, in short, GarageBand is not a useless tool; you can be creative with it, and it's a great place for novices like me to start out with (and impress the socks off of people with the samples!).

 

[jfg@forum]

Re: Composition Tool

Everything you say is true but if you come up with something great and want to develop it in a program like Logic you cannot because there is no way to transfer it - no midi export.

 

[cliffardo2001]

Can't I import AIFF to Logic? And also, can't I perhaps export one track at a time to AIFF and restore the erased files in GarageBand with undo edit? I know this is perhaps a round about way of doing things, but as the program is now, isn't this feasible/reasonable?

 

[jfg@forum]

Originally posted by cliffardo2001
Can't I import AIFF to Logic? And also, can't I perhaps export one track at a time to AIFF and restore the erased files in GarageBand with undo edit? I know this is perhaps a round about way of doing things, but as the program is now, isn't this feasible/reasonable?

Yes you can but an aiff file is not the same as midi. You cannot change notes, add chords, print as sheet music, etc. For this you need mdii.

 

[cliffardo2001]

I thought you could alter recorded audio wiht minimal distortion with Logic. I seem to remember this when Logic was demonstrated to me.

 

[Harald4]

Hi Cliff,
you're cute selling logic, working for emagic, eh?

Anyway, the name of the game is music.
Can you afford $999 plus an audio/midi interface? Do it!

If you can't, good news: it's already in your mac.
Spend some time on the web and find the tools you need and better, learn how to use them.