Latency question

I can't answer all you questions, but here's some answers for you...

In GarageBand, loops are "prerecorded" music. There are also seperate midi instruments in Garage Band. If you look at the descriptions of the Jam Pack series, they talk about both additional loops and additional instruments.

I am not aware of what delay you're talking about in playing "virtual instruments" but with what I have seen in GarageBand, there appers to be no delay from hitting a key to a sound coming out of the computers' speakers.

Most of the Apple Stores seem to have at least one system set up with a midi keyboard. You can go in and try it out yourself. That is if you live close enough to one.

 

There seems to be very little latency on the native GB instruments, mainly cos their all Logic synth or sample based systems and the platform is written to accomodate them, it's not so rosy with 3rd part plug-ins, but remember that GB isn't supposed to be as capable as Logic or Nuendo, it's a freebie (albeit a bloody powerful one).

Apple can get around the issue because OSX, Logic (GB) and the plug-ins are all written to play nicely, they don't need to worry about the common coding of the VST wrapper etc.

The loops are a mixture of individual instruments (loads of them) and backing tracks in various styles, but even the backing tracks are well chosen, being that percussion loops and melody stuff are still separate.

Other loops and instruments are avaliable, and you can make your own loops by downloading the Soundtrack Loop Utility from the Apple developers section of the website.

For a freebie, GB is a great little app, sure it's not perfect, but it's better than all other freeware music apps, and a lot better than some apps that cost hundreds.

 

The only time I have problems with latency is if I unplug an instrument and plug in a new one. With an acoustic guitar, this seems to be around half a second. Closing and restarting Garageband with the instrument plugged in fixes the problem.