Garageband, Just received Garageband Options

Hi. Just received Garageband as a part of iLife.

The Grand Piano has string resonance and has been wonderfully sampled.

There's only a little midi latency. Though midi worked right away, with out changing any settings.

It's amazingly good stuff for beginners and children with a little talent will be able to make impressing things with it.

I wish it had been there when I was 15.

And it's really easy to make simple demos with it.

It's the kind of thing that has some restrictions (to keep it simple) that could evoke a lot of creativity.

[BusError]

Did some more tests, after reducing the clock of the EZBus so the USB downgraded to 44.1. They DO have a built in limitation to 44.1 outputs, despite them (apple) whinning at us developpers so we support any kind of oupouts blah blah.

Overall they have very good instruments. The bass, guitar and a couple others a just amazing IMO.

Some of the loops are failry good, but it's still very, very limited, and nothing like Steve's Demo™ (in fact, I wonder how long it took to teach him to demo it like that, it LOOKED magic)

Anyway, even with the expansion pack, all you really get is a bunch of very good instruments. if you use Detour or Jack Tools (untested) you can probably make yourself some nice tracks to mix in another sequencer.
Some of the effetcs are good too, I particularly like the Flanger; espeocialy at low frequency. On the other hand the Overdrive has a wierd "snap" to it that I don't particularly like.

The recording sucks BTW, it managed to transpose stuff I played without asking me, overriding stuff that was there when it was not suposed to, etc. And you can't choose between "add" and "overide" when recording a loop, thats annoying when editing.

Also, there is no way to import any MIDI tracks. I tried importing even a simple one-channel track using the IAC driver as output/imput from say Metro to GB and all I get is a Colorful Spinning Pizza of Hell in GB when I stop the recording. damn!

So, all I could come up with so far are a few small mp3 ringtones for my mobile phone. Next I'll try to plug in a guitar to see how good the "amp" things are...