Marin’s blog

Now essentially what I was interested was the new GarageBand 4 that comes with iLife ‘08. From what I’ve seen GarageBand moves towards getting more and more users instead of providing its already existing users with more of the features they would like to have. I can easily understand this of course since one should be constantly encouraged to buy the Logic Pro …

However the good news are just beautiful. The new iMac is the most beautiful computer you ever saw and it’s damn fast. More hard disc space, glossy screen, no old fashioned slow 1.8GHz version. It’s a beautiful baby.

In iLife I would say I’m most interested in GarageBand, but still the new features in iPhoto and iMovie are pretty neat. Don’t get me started on the new features of the new iWeb … It’s incredible. No need to tell you Apple know what they do and they do it stylish.

However most noticeable new feautures of GarageBand 4 are :

- Arrangements : Now that’s a pretty neat feature - most of the people would love to create a real top 10 hit on their mac, so usually people tend to write songs in GarageBand using loops, singing, etc. With the arrangements building a song is easier since you can divide your project in intro, chorus, verses, etc. thumbs up !

- Multitake recording : well that’s a neat feature but I have to try it few times, before I’m sure whether is useful or not. In brief while you’re in loop mode you can record few versions the audio in the loop, then choose 1 (or more) version and abandon the rest of the takes. well, neat no doubt

- Visual EQ : well everyone knows what’s that, and GarageBand should have it time ago. Now is here and we’re happy, thumbs up and up once again

- Automation : finally the users can automate not only the volume and the pan but also tempo, effects and instruments. Well that’s really something- thanks Apple

- Magic GarageBand : now that’s something I don’t quite get, but I’ll try to explain what I suspect it is - now people around the world are using the same loops to create somewhat different songs. With Magic GarageBand everyone will create more and more similar songs. I don’t know if that’s correct impression. We will see.

Final notes

Even though I’m not using iWork (in favor of NeoOffice) I should say I’ve watched all videos on apple.com and what I saw was amazing. Apple’s software beats likes gazillion (1,000,000,000,000,000….) times the good old MS Word and MS Excel … (Especially the good old Excel) . The news is Apple developed their own spreadsheet application called Numbers and it’s hot !!!

http://www.apple.com/iwork/numbers/

How do I get it ?

Either buy a new Mac (and you get iLife with it) or buy it from apple store

Hope it was helpful

Marin