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Apple Releases Soundtrack
An anonymous reader writes "Apple have released Soundtrack to retail. The application, which is similar to ACID and FruityLoops on the PC, allows composition of music from a library of over 4000 samples (approx 14GB of data) that can be used royalty-free. It also supports the AudioUnit framework (which has a new logo) and comes with 30 AUs bundled in the box. The application was previously only available bundled in Final Cut Pro 4 and will retail for $299/£249."
Well, MacWorld ain't what it used to be. Long live WWDC!
Care to be asshole buddies?
And fix the awful color scheme on this page.
If linux ever catches up in this dept I may very well never have to dual boot again. Sure wish they would but I don't see it happening. *shrug
My
Limekiller
Yeah, royalty free until the RIAA uses the DMCA to arrest everyone that bought it.
Is Apple trying to kill off nearly all 3rd party development for their platform or are they trying to fill blanks where 3rd party developers aren't doing as well as Apple would like for them to do?
This app requires a G4/500 or G4/450 dual proc. Is it just me or does this seem like an awful lot to run this app?
I'm using Logic Audio on a G4/350 and it's quite capable of running all the Emagic plug-ins included with Soundtrack.
Has anyone looked at the EULA / licence on those samples yet? What prevents someone from just re-releasing the samples to the public for very little (cost of several DVDs).
I made a short film of my vacation in Rio and decided to use it to learn SoundTrack.
I am absolutely clueless about music, and what I composed to go with my movie is nowhere close to being a great work of art.
At the same time, the movie with music is a great deal more entertaining than the movie without, so I think it achieved its purpose. (I would do this now, but I can't do it from work).
The main problem I found with SoundTrack is that it seems severely weighted towards precussion and specific types of music (vaguely sad-sounding piano jazz, rock of various types), and the selection of loops outside of those categories is extremely limited. So I had literally thousands of precussion choices, about 10-20 of which would have done well with my film, but only three good horn selections, all of which I used, and one of which I used repeatedly. I really wanted to have some good horn selections that would blend together, but I didn't see anything like that.
I'd certainly pay good money for a few hundred horn loops I could use with the already extensive precussion. And I understand Soundtrack is really a version of an already existing sound system, but I don't know where to find the loops.
If I get a couple of replies asking for it, I will put the movie on the web and a link to the movie here, so you can see what a neophyte can do with SoundTrack after about a day or so of fooling with it.
This all being said, it would be nice to learn something of music theory. Can anyone recommend a good book, suitable for complete beginners?
If nothing else, SoundTrack is going to increase people's interest in music composition, which can't be a bad thing. I think it could also be used to provide a draft sound track which could then be worked on with a real composer. Timing issues are very difficult with SoundTrack since the tracks are generally of fixed lengths. You can loop them, but generally you can't reduce their length and get good results.
D
Ok. Its a drum on the side panel. On the front from the left...a keyboard, then a cello. From the right we have a clarinet and then an electric guitar. What is that thing in the middle??
It figures. Just after the expiration of the one-year warranty, my iBook starts having problems (Apple hardware has a history of this apparently). The right speaker now cuts in and out, but more annoying is the ticking sound the computer started making last night. Well, it's not a tick exactly, more like a pop. A popping tick maybe. Hard to describe. Sounds like a tiny spark leaping across a tiny gap, waiting for its chance to become a big spark and hose my whole system. Or the platter on my hard drive skipping against something.
I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you Mac fanatics? I've been sitting here at my cubicle in front of a Mac (a brand new dual G4 1400MHz with a gig of RAM) for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to copy a 20 meg file from one folder on the hard drive to another folder. 20 minutes. At home, on my Pentium Pro 200 running NT 4, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this Mac, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.
In addition, during this file transfer, Safari will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even SimpleText is straining to keep up as I type this.
I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on various Macs, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a Mac that has run faster than its Wintel counterpart, despite the Macs' faster chip architecture. My 486/66 with 8 megs of ram runs faster than this dual G4 machine at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that the Macintosh is a superior machine.
Mac addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use a Mac over other faster, cheaper, more stable systems.
I got SoundTrack with FCP 4 the day before they were released. I have since spent more time making music than editing with Final Cut! I absolutely love SoundTrack. It is exactly what I have been looking for. I have never tried sound editing before and this program was as easy to learn as any I have ever used. I think it may help to understand the GUI of FCP, but everything is pretty self explanatory:
You have a timeline with multiple layers, and you have your stock music. Drag and drop. Much of the supplied music is looped, so increasing the time of a certain sound is as simple as dragging the edge of the sound. Also, there is a loop editor so you can make your own loops! The effects are really impressive too, everything is done on the fly, and I am really impressed with the quality of the output.
I am a complete beginner when it comes to sound editing, so I have never used stuff like Logic. I cannot compare SoundTrack to anything, so I cannot say if it is truly a "professional" app. I can say it is the best add on for FCP (for my needs) that I can possibly imagine. I finally have some audio to lay over my video tracks! Woohoo!
Actually, SimpleText is available in /Developer/Applications/Extras/SimpleText
"Civis Europaeus sum!"
yes ... and the About SimpleText box says:
"Sample code, demonstrates features of the Carbon High Level Toolbox"
why would anyone use SimpleText (a demonstration application) for 'work' as opposed to TextEdit? it seems more likely to me the the original FUDster was relying on his memory of OS 9 apps to bash OS 10.
I agree with you. I was just pointing out that it did exist... :)
"Civis Europaeus sum!"
Soundtrack is part of FCP4. I do not know if they always intended to roll it out this way or what, but they had to make this for Final Cut Pro to jump to the next level. Releasing this on its own is nice for people not needing the full AV app (FCP4 is $$$$$). This also makes it really easy for users of Soundtrack to someday pick up FCP and know what's going on. From what i saw today, this could replace a few apps that people use right now. Yes, pro-tools is great and can be downloaded from them for free (lite version to run without hardware) but this incorporates a few other things.
No diss to Pro-Tools (even for their pokeyness with releasing an OS X version), but this does things that Pro-Tools is really not intended for (but often used for).
Kind of like people who use photoshop for EVERYTHING with computer graphics!
Anyone looking for a cheaper product to produce royalty free music should take a look at the Music series for Playstation (1 & 2). Music 3000 is the latest incarnation - it squeezes 64 channels of 48kHz sample playback out of the PS2 hardware.
After about three months of relentless Willy action I reckon I'm now as good as when I was 10.
I'm a user of Acid Pro and FruityLoops (Big Pro Thingy From Hell edition). I've been thinking of moving my music production to the Apple for quite some time, but the only product I'd evaluated was ProTools. I hate it. I have a large mixing board and I do not want another one emulated on my computer.
Most of my stuff is either custom loop-based, where I create my own loops with my own synths and stuff, or percussive tracks with triggered one-shot samples. Acid with SoundForge and FruityLoops do everything I need in those instances, respectively.
The blurb says that the product "is similar to Acid and FruityLoops." This doesn't sound right to me; the two programs both produce music, but the similarity ends right there.
So, has anybody on this thread used all three products? And would you care to give an evaluation based on music creation merits?
There's so little difference between politics and jihad lately...
"Fruity Loops" is designed to work on sequences of looped music. That's it's main purpose and that's what it does best.
"Soundtrack" is designed to allow music authoring for movies. While this may include using looped sequences, it doesn't even come close to a fraction of the power of "Fruity Loops" when working on looping sequences.
"Fruity Loops" is an awesome program, as is "Soundtrack" I'm sure. They both do their job well. When it comes to comparing the two, I don't think either one falls into the other's category.
It's just not possible to do that level of real time sound morphing without a G4
It also supports the AudioUnit framework (which has a new logo) and comes with 30 AUs bundled in the box
:)
I didn't know you could sell Astronomical Units in a box !! damn, those Apple folks are good
or maybe I should consider buying reading glasses...
Music is the language of the heart, the sound of the soul. -Joe Satriani
Actualy, he was using an old troll, reformatted because the old one had been thoroughly shot to hell and forgot to actualy pay attention.
From the good people over at cycling74
It's $250 US, but well worth it, IMHO.
I think it's very intuitive. Any program that I can use without having to crack open the manual or even go to the help pages counts as intuitive in my book. Frankly, it rocks. The interface is beautiful because it's so functional, not like in many cases (OSX finder debatably included), where it's functional despite its beauty.
It's great for live sets. I haven't done a long DJ set yet, but for short ones, it works great. The only thing I don't like is that if you overtax your proc too much, you'll start hearing clicks and/or noise. On a g3 iBook, it's not that hard to overtax your proc, especially if you're running Reason as a slave app.
c-hack.com |
Most of the people who use this software are not interested in the actually compostions, but creating their own. So it is not like stealing because it is a source of sound, or a computerized instrument, which allows them to create their own music.