Playing in the Garage Band
I spent a couple of hours last night playing with Apple's Garage Band. The results are here.
I didn't try anything too complex - just using Apple's provided loops to assemble (seems like a more appropriate word than "write", much less than "compose") a piece. I used seven tracks, and the G4 Powerbook (1.25 GHz, 512 MB RAM) seemed to hold up fine, although I noticed that near the end the visual display wasn't quite keeping up with the audio.
There are some things I was used to in Sonic Foundry's Acid software for Windows that I didn't find in Garage Band so far - the ability to fade tracks in and out individually within a piece, and a the ability to have "one-offs" in addition to loops - for those points in time where you just want to add a single sound, such as a cymbal crash or a whack.
And does anybody know what the rules are for redistributing product based on Garage Band loops? I assume they're freely redistributable, but it would be nice to know that for a fact.
I look forward to playing more with Garage Band, especially trying plugging real instruments into it and playing along, though I don't imagine it will replace playing real music with real friends - at least, I hope not! :)
I don't have GarageBand in front of me, so I can't tell you precisely how to do it, but...
You can expand an area under each track that allows you to change the volume throughout the piece, for fade in/out.
Some of the tracks can be altered. When you switch to the more detailed view (not the selector) where you can transpose and such, there is a sort of piano roll looking score, and you can manipulate the notes in the loop. Kinda hard to describe, especially without looking at it...