Advice Needed Getting Started, Garage Band + Guitar Options

[aww68]

Hi,

I play a little guitar, and have recently purchased iLife (with Garage Band) for my 17" iMac. I want to try plugging my Fender into the audio-in port of my iMac, but am not sure about the best way to do it. I went to Guitar Center and was going to buy a 1/4" to 1/8" converter, but the guy at the store wasn't sure if that would really work. He talked about analog to digital processing and how the iMac may not be able to do the work.

However, if I read the Apple web site correctly, it seems like they think it'll work.

Will a simple converter really do the trick, or do I need something else?

Thanks!!!

[Dadoo]

Well, I'm newbie myself and so my comments may be just the "blind leading the blind", so someone more knowledgeable can come along and correct me if I'm wrong. My understanding is that you can easily plug your guitar or other instrument into your audio input on your Mac with a cable that converts the 1/4 inch to the 1/8 inch. I'm not aware that these are any kind of special cable for computers. I think I noticed some "cable" sites and the Apple website when I was checking into GarageBand myself. I believe the ads were on the same pages as the GarageBand pages. So you could check there and see if they mention that the simple adapter cables are anything unique to computer use.

That said, getting a certain level of quality of sound is an issue. I think that Apple's audio input jack puts 16 bit sound at 44 KHz into your computer. CD quality sound is 24 bit at 96 KHz. So if you are concerned about recording CD quality sound, then I think you need to have an audio interface that puts that sound into your computer via USB or FireWire. If you are just playing your guitar into your computer to have fun with GarageBand and make some music for yourself and reasonable quality sound, then all you should need is the adapter cable with GarageBand.