GarageBand 3 — an update for musicians?

All the buzz about GarageBand 3 has been about its new features in the areas of creating podcasts and scoring an iMovie project. The second area isn't really new — when GarageBand first came out, it was touted as being for people who wanted to add a soundtrack of their own to an iDVD or iMovie project, but allowing you to view the movie as you score is obviously an improvement on crossing your fingers and hoping everything synchs.

However, this look at GarageBand isn't about either of these two areas, (though I do want to look at the movie-scoring abilities of GarageBand 3 at some point, as the idea of having a go at movie scoring is one of the things that pushed me into upgrading). What I'm going to be looking at in this article is whether GarageBand 3 offers anything significant for what has, up to now, been its core user-base: people who make music. GarageBand 2 came with new music-editing features, including the ability to tighten the timing and tuning of a track, plus a whole new category of Software instrument, Synth Textures. Has GarageBand 3 got anything similar to keep us non-podcasters happy?

GarageBand 3 in the dock — literally

On launching GarageBand 3, the first thing that struck me was the look of the progress window — not OS X white but the brushed metal of iTunes.

The next thing that struck me — 12 times, in fact — was this message:

After clicking OK a few times, then hitting return when I got fed up of doing that, I finally got to the main GarageBand screen, only to have the same dialog pop up a few more times.

What was going wrong? I don't know, but a quick check on the Apple Discussion Boards revealed a fix: start up the Audio-MIDI Setup application and keep it running while GarageBand launches. (I later realised this was because the iLife installer didn't recommend a restart. Since restarting my computer, GarageBand 3 has started every time perfectly.)

The next thing I noticed was that, upon opening, GarageBand 3 resized its window to take up the whole screen. That's alright, I usually let it take up the whole screen anyway — or almost the whole screen, because I have my dock on the right-hand edge. GarageBand 3, however, ignored my dock and resized its window under that. And then refused to let me make its window any smaller horizontally. I can still operate all its controls, but not without the distinctly annoying risk of accidentally clicking something in the dock and starting up an unwanted application. (iWeb twice, so far.)

(I have since learned that GarageBand merely has a minimum width of 1024. Setting my eMac to disply 1152 x 864 allowed me to clear GarageBand out from under the dock. So that's another gripe solved.)

Well, some good news, I suppose

Okay, so I next looked through the menus and preferences to see what was new, and finally found some good news. The Count In setting has finally got a quick key! You can now press shift++U to turn it on or off. Progress at last.

To balance this out, bad with good, Apple have moved the Export to iTunes menu item from the File menu to a new Share menu.

Hmm, Share. I don't like it. Not only is it a bit touchy-feely Microsofty, but it's inaccurate. Is it sharing if I export a song I've just made to my own iTunes library? No, it's exporting. Why not use a tried-and-tested (and well-understood) term instead of a new one? Well, exporting from GarageBand has never been its strong point. It's part of the feel of the iLife suite that its users are computer-phobes who need to be protected from knowing anything about files and so on. At least it's just a cosmetic change, not a functional one.

Looking at GarageBand 3's Preferences, here's a new function — the General preferences pane has an iLife Preview option. Keep this checked (it's on by default), and every time you save your song, GarageBand 3 will create a mix-down to be used as a preview by the Media Browser in other iLife applications — iMovie, and so on. This is all very well, but I don't want to have to wait that long each time I save — I'm an habitual saver, so this option could quickly get pretty tiresome. It might prove to be of some use as a back-door export option, but for now I'll keep it turned off.

Oh, and I also noticed that the application doesn't always respond to -H, or the menu Hide command.

GarageBand 3.01, where are you?

New look info

Getting down to some basics, GarageBand 3's info window is no longer a separate window. Bring up track info and you get something like the drawer in Mail, only more integrated into the main window. I actually prefer this (if only some of its controls weren't hiding under my dock), though it does mean you have to wait a fraction of a second longer to get your info window, as the appearance of the new info section is animated (it slides in).

Other than that, apart from the brushed-metal look, there's nothing significantly different about the info window. Creating a new track causes a sheet to drop down from GarageBand's title bar asking if you want a Software or Real instrument track, then you get to fiddle around with the track info window as usual.

Popup the settings window for an effect or a sound generator, and you see that they've now got a graphic at the top of the window, which is quite nice.

New stuff?

Any new effects? One. Speech Enhancer. It's for getting a better sound out of microphones for spoken-word tracks and includes noise-reduction and some presets for dealing with different microphone types (mostly built-in computer mics) and voice types.

Any new sound generators? One. Sound Effects. This is basically like the drum kit sound generator, in that it plays a different sound sample for each note, and none of them are musical. You get four sets of sounds: Applause and Laughter, Comedy Noises, Nature Sounds and Radio Sounds (which consists of some twirly-tuning sounds plus a few fully-fledged jingles). Each set has 18 sounds.

GarageBand 3 has added some Real Instrument presets, however. And, for the record, here's a few other new features and behaviours in GarageBand 3: when you export ("share") a song to iTunes, iTunes now automatically starts playing it; if you set your playhead position display to show minutes and seconds rather than bars and beats, the grid of the main part of the screen now changes to show minutes and seconds, too, which is alright though the snap to grid feature then operates according to minutes and seconds, not bars and beats.

New file format

I haven't experimented it with myself, but I've read that GarageBand 3 uses a new file format which isn't backwards-compatible; so backup your GarageBand 2 songs before you open and save them in version 3. Songs in GarageBand 3 are still packages, though, and you can still access recorded Real instrument parts as AIF files, as detailed in other articles on this site.

A quick look at GarageBand 3's internals reveals that it has added a Templates folder to the Library/Application Support/GarageBand folder, containing two files, one called New Movie Score, the other called New Podcast Episode. (When you choose New Song in GarageBand 3, you get a choice of creating a new music project, a new movie score project or a new podcast project; you can, however, bring up a movie track and access podcast features from a standard music project, so these are just shortcuts to get you set up.) As these templates are accessed by buttons, not a list, I doubt that adding a new file here will allow you to create you own templates, but it may be worth looking into.

Conclusions?

Well, my first look at GarageBand 3 wasn't a great experience. There's nothing really new musically, but there are a bunch of minor annoyances, none of which are going to stop me getting on with making music, but which are going to make using GarageBand 3 a little more difficult (till they come out with that update) than GarageBand 2.

But I really bought it for the Movie Score feature, something I've yet to try. I'll report on that as soon as I get round to it.