Garageband is possibly the single greatest piece of software ever

[motulist]

I used to work in the music industry and I did a lot of music production work using an expensive high end audio sequence app called Digital Performer. A few years ago I got out of the music biz and when I did I decided to ditch doing music production and just focus on making music with my real music instruments (piano and guitar mainly).

This previous september I bought a new Mac which happened to come with Garageband, and a couple of months ago I decided to fire it up just to have some fun. I didn't expect to do much with it because I assumed it was pretty much just a toy. Holy cow was I wrong! I did more real music production in the past 2 months than I wound up getting accomplished in 6 months when I used to use Digital Performer (DP). DP and other similar high end sequencers are always so frustrating and un-fun to use, I'd always wind up getting bogged down in dealing with the technical workings of the sequence program itself instead of, y'know, actually making music. Working in Garageband is so fun and simple and intuitive that I actually get MUCH more music production actually accomplished per hour than I ever did with the high end sequencer apps.

There definitely are a couple of features that are sorely lacking in Garageband that definitely do limit me from doing some of the things I want to do, but those negatives are FAR outweighed by the overall level of pure music-creation awesomeness that Garageband delivers.

I had to share this news with the world.

 

[JCMusic]

If you like Garage Band, you should eventually try moving up to something like Logic Express or Logic Pro! Also Reason is VERY cool. Working in DP 7 these days is fantastic also. (I've been a DP user since 1991 when it was only just "Performer" with no audio recording options - just a sequencer back then! Those were the days . . .

 

[motulist]

If you like Garage Band, you should eventually try moving up to something like Logic Express or Logic Pro!

Thanks for the advice, but given my experience, that would actually be a step down, not a step up.

I used DP up through version 5, and man was it frustrating and annoying to use. Same goes for all the "high end" sequencers, which are full of a billion features most people will never use, all of which very much get in the way of actually being able to make music. And the technical capabilities under the hood are capable of doing hollywood-level film scores for Steven Spielberg movies, which is great if you're scoring a movie for Steven Spielberg, but in everyday music production all those extra technical capabilities that almost no one ever needs actually wind up just making it harder for most people to make music, because heaven forbid if any technical problem pops up - because then you have to switch out of your music-mind and put your computer-geek hat on as you go spelunking into the deep dark depths of settings, options, routings, patchings, etc. And due to all the companies trying to compete with each other on the basis of fancy new features, all of the "high-end" sequencers have a billion different features that you can't turn off, which make it hard to find the features you do want, and which litter the interface with a zillion extra buttons that just get in the way.

No thank you. Garageband has it nearly perfect. Gimmie my tracks, easy and intuitive access to editing, awesome sounding soft synths with lots of great presets, enough technical power to do 95% of what I want, pretty powerful mixing that's ridiculously simple to use, and other than that - just keep the garbage out of my way and let me make music!

 

[Kasalic]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_3 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8J2 Safari/6533.18.5)

Welcome to the world of macs.

As a mac support professional the one thing I get to hear on a regular basis is along the lines of 'I find I spend far more time on doing stuff with my digital media and far less time fighting the system'

This for me is what Apple get so right, and it's what most of the more techie people miss.

I love being able to plug in camera, quickly sort/crop/adjust them and then upload to website/MobileMe/flickr etc with so little fuss.

I would backup the previous comments about logic express though. It might have the other 5% features you would like whilst retaining all the things you love about GarageBand. I tend to use aperture (the upgrade to iphoto) when I have a load of shots from a motor racing event as it is even better than iphoto for the initial sort/grade/delete phase.