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mmcirvinI finally broke down and shelled out the Apple tax to get the better version of iPhoto, GarageBand, and a couple of other things I don't use. I can't comment on the things I don't use. But the new version of iPhoto really does seem considerably better; based on a very cursory look, it's definitely much faster on my G4, the interface organization is better designed to deal with large libraries, and the live zooming in the edit window now does a high-quality pass once you're done fiddling with the slider. Subtle as it is, this last is actually my favorite enhancement; most people probably don't notice it, but the low-quality zoom in iPhoto had always annoyed me, and it's really nice to see that fixed.
GarageBand is an interesting toy. It may never be anything more than that for me because I suck, so I'm probably not the right person to review it. I did manage to bang out a little composition in an hour or two, which I am not going to post for you because it was mind-shatteringly inane, this being the extent of my musical imagination. But, who knows: I may be able to do slightly better someday if I fiddle around with it a whole lot. If not, no harm done; you'll never hear any of it. And since I have headphones, I can do this without irritating anybody, unlike my experiments with Electronic Arts' Music Construction Set many years ago, which annoyed my parents intensely.
Since I'm not really a musician, I don't have any instruments or mikes that plug into my Mac. I was interested to see if, under these conditions, it was possible to go beyond the pasting together of canned loops and actually compose a melody with the MIDI-esque software instruments. The answer is yes, though it's obviously not what the program was primarily designed for. There's an awkward on-screen piano keyboard palette that you can dink on with the mouse. No human being could play this at a reasonable speed (and it's obviously impossible to play chords), but that's not an insurmountable limitation, since there is also a track editor. This displays the notes you played, not in conventional musical notation, but as little rectangles on something resembling a player piano roll, with time on the horizontal axis and pitch in a chromatic scale on the vertical. (Apparently this is a popular interface for digital music software.) You can then drag notes in both dimensions, copy them to make chords, snap them to the time intervals of your choosing, and vary their lengths and keystroke velocities. The notes play when you click on them, so the way they sound is not left entirely to the imagination while you're editing them. You can control the speed of the whole track, and also control how the volume of a track or of the entire piece varies over time, and move tracks around in the stereo space, and probably do lots of other stuff I don't understand.
So even without a MIDI instrument or any ability to play one, it's possible to stumble your way through a rough melody on the keyboard and then turn it into something resembling music. In this way, I managed to produce a track of piano and a track of fakey-sounding strings, and then added a canned drum loop out of the library. I'd kind of like the ability to just start with the track editor, but if that's possible, I haven't figured out how to do it yet; you have to have some notes to start with. I suppose you could play one note on the keyboard and then spawn all the other notes from that one ancestral Ur-note. There also seem to be some occasional small interface bugs with the editing process, though nothing crippling; once in a while it can be hard to get a dragging operation to take. The recent 1.0.1 update seems to be better in this regard than 1.0, though I could be imagining things.
I was interested to hear![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
jwgh's positive reaction to GarageBand, since I've heard disdainful and/or fearful reactions to it from some musicians; they either see it as some sort of threat, or as a useless toy, or both (which makes no sense to me since it seems that one would preclude the other: the essay I linked to can be summarized as "GarageBand is evil because amateurs pasting loops together will put us all out of work, except that that won't happen because the music wouldn't be any good, but because I just thought that might happen it's evil anyway"). The usual reaction seems to be that anyone who actually knows something about music has already paid more money for some more serious music software, and the only people remaining are people like me who won't be able to do anything interesting with it anyway. But Jake seems to be a counterexample.
The obvious analogy already made by many is that it's the audio equivalent of low-end consumer desktop publishing software: it didn't make graphic designers obsolete, and most of the people using it produced wretched clip-art-infested results, but it still has its place.
GarageBand is an interesting toy. It may never be anything more than that for me because I suck, so I'm probably not the right person to review it. I did manage to bang out a little composition in an hour or two, which I am not going to post for you because it was mind-shatteringly inane, this being the extent of my musical imagination. But, who knows: I may be able to do slightly better someday if I fiddle around with it a whole lot. If not, no harm done; you'll never hear any of it. And since I have headphones, I can do this without irritating anybody, unlike my experiments with Electronic Arts' Music Construction Set many years ago, which annoyed my parents intensely.
Since I'm not really a musician, I don't have any instruments or mikes that plug into my Mac. I was interested to see if, under these conditions, it was possible to go beyond the pasting together of canned loops and actually compose a melody with the MIDI-esque software instruments. The answer is yes, though it's obviously not what the program was primarily designed for. There's an awkward on-screen piano keyboard palette that you can dink on with the mouse. No human being could play this at a reasonable speed (and it's obviously impossible to play chords), but that's not an insurmountable limitation, since there is also a track editor. This displays the notes you played, not in conventional musical notation, but as little rectangles on something resembling a player piano roll, with time on the horizontal axis and pitch in a chromatic scale on the vertical. (Apparently this is a popular interface for digital music software.) You can then drag notes in both dimensions, copy them to make chords, snap them to the time intervals of your choosing, and vary their lengths and keystroke velocities. The notes play when you click on them, so the way they sound is not left entirely to the imagination while you're editing them. You can control the speed of the whole track, and also control how the volume of a track or of the entire piece varies over time, and move tracks around in the stereo space, and probably do lots of other stuff I don't understand.
So even without a MIDI instrument or any ability to play one, it's possible to stumble your way through a rough melody on the keyboard and then turn it into something resembling music. In this way, I managed to produce a track of piano and a track of fakey-sounding strings, and then added a canned drum loop out of the library. I'd kind of like the ability to just start with the track editor, but if that's possible, I haven't figured out how to do it yet; you have to have some notes to start with. I suppose you could play one note on the keyboard and then spawn all the other notes from that one ancestral Ur-note. There also seem to be some occasional small interface bugs with the editing process, though nothing crippling; once in a while it can be hard to get a dragging operation to take. The recent 1.0.1 update seems to be better in this regard than 1.0, though I could be imagining things.
I was interested to hear
jwgh's positive reaction to GarageBand, since I've heard disdainful and/or fearful reactions to it from some musicians; they either see it as some sort of threat, or as a useless toy, or both (which makes no sense to me since it seems that one would preclude the other: the essay I linked to can be summarized as "GarageBand is evil because amateurs pasting loops together will put us all out of work, except that that won't happen because the music wouldn't be any good, but because I just thought that might happen it's evil anyway"). The usual reaction seems to be that anyone who actually knows something about music has already paid more money for some more serious music software, and the only people remaining are people like me who won't be able to do anything interesting with it anyway. But Jake seems to be a counterexample.The obvious analogy already made by many is that it's the audio equivalent of low-end consumer desktop publishing software: it didn't make graphic designers obsolete, and most of the people using it produced wretched clip-art-infested results, but it still has its place.
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Re:
Date: 2004-02-18 02:39 pm (UTC)It's kind of nice to get partway back to a world in which this is a significant part of the appreciation of music. (Which I suppose ties into stuff
One of my other favorites is a song that I accidentally discovered that is by some random guys I never heard of on the Internet, and I'm probably this song's only fan. It is the Joe Shlabotnik of songs. I have this on my playlist in between songs by the Rolling Stones and the White Stripes, and it fits perfectly.
I suppose that if you wanted to extract a hand-wringing complaint out of this, you could worry that it is a sign of the fragmentation of society and the loss of a common cultural canon that might otherwise unite the world. Whereas if the opposite happened it would be the suppression of creativity in favor of mass-produced pablum. It's always convenient to find a slippery slope that slips downward in both directions.