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GarageBand Audio Unit Effects Tutorial
LG writes "The wild popularity of Apple's new music program, GarageBand, has surprisingly not yielded much in the way of instructions or guides (the program does not come with a manual, printed or electronic -- just some simple tutorial PDFs). Thus, there are many cool but totally undocumented features in GarageBand. MacJams.com has recently posted a fairly lengthy tutorial on the built-in Audio Unit effects in GarageBand, including things like delay, filters, compressor, reverb, etc. Hopefully similar documentation will start to pop up."
GarageBand, and the general plethora of opportunity it provides to musicians -hobbyist, serious and 'pro'- is a definite improvement in the standard for media content creation tools.
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:)
with this simple app, you're able to do things which previously required a fairly significant investment. its a great 'raising of the bar' by apple in the media content-creation apps sphere
i only feel sorry for apps like Intuem, which is a native OSX-only app in the DAW sphere... surely they can't be too happy about competing with Apple directly, themselves, on an OSX-native DAW system.
nevertheless, its great to see people starting to realize that no, Virginia, "Pro Tools" does not make a pro. In fact, you can do things with GB now, which once were the exlusive domain of the 'elite' packages like Pro Tools.
Amen to the erosion of elitism, i say!
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
By time the summer comes around I am sure we will see books on the GarageBand come rolling in. The book writers probably didn't get a head start with a pre-release version, so they only have the public release to work with. Also, to be able to write a good book, you need to understand fully how to use the tool.
Then again you will probably spend all day tinkering with the possibilities, that you won't have time to read a book.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
What I'd like to see is a simple way to write GarageBand files from perl. It could be used to generate "music" based on a script output (imagine every few songs your streaming mp3 player would play an automtically generated GB song with "pleasant" sounding music when your net's okay, and "discordant" music when something weird's up).
Or, more usefully, for various tablature -> GB conversions.
I know there are some perl-to-MIDI modules, but from what I understand getting those into GarageBand requires additional steps, too, right?
Anyway, I haven't had time to really search for this, so I'm sure that someone else has already come up with a solution. I just thought I'd mention it to see if anyone's got anything cool done along these lines...
I wonder if, in this case, Apple has purposely created only a minimal set of documentation in order to feed interest in GarageBand. For many people, finding undocumented features and easter eggs in software is fun. Couple that with GarageBand's "coolness factor" and you wind up with a group of very avid users. Granted, there would probably be fewer of them, but they would more than make up for that in loyalty and word-of-mouth advertising.
One of the problems in doing this is that, to do any justice to programs of the complexity/simplicity twin nature of Apple's developments, documentation would have to be impossibly long. It's hard to cram the kind of information people can really use and from which they can draw ideas and solutions when they have a size limit of, oh say one hundred pages or so.
Engaging and thorough technical writing takes hundreds of pages to pull off correctly. Hundreds of pages are expensive to print, bind, and ship with the product - and time consuming to write, possibly further delaying a product.
I think the Apple community does a great job of making up the difference by creating their own resources and writing their own books. I might even go so far as to say that the lack of "official" documentation has created a nice atmosphere of "let's figure out how this bad boy works" (something a previous poster has already pointed out).
Less imposing?
Personally I think it's a shame is that people need a "missing manual". Apple's software is very easy to understand if you have any understanding of the task you are attempting to perform. If you play with the software you should be able to use it well within a day, just from tinkering.
As for Apple not including a manual or PDF with documentation... perhaps people should learn what that "Help" menu is all about. Oh, that's right, there's no manual to explain how to use the help menu.
Article X: The powers not delegated... by the Constitution...are reserved...to the people
As someone who has worked on a number of programs, I can tell you that not having documentation as a certainty can change how the programmer thinks about things as well. If you don't know if your end users will have any manual, and in fact you have been told that they will most likely be starting the application up raw, it makes for a change in thinking about design elements. Does this button here make sense? Are the labels as self-explanatory as possible? Are there sufficient little help messages when needed? In many other cases, these are things that can pushed aside a bit ("Oh well, they can always look at it in the manual. It makes sense to me.") So Apple's stance may actually help make for a self fulfilling prophecy: no documentation taken for granted helps lead to software that doesn't need it as much.
If you have not already, I encourage you to watch the introduction during MacWorld 04 (http://www.apple.com/quicktime/qtv/mwsf04/). This app looks very powerful for its price.
Has anyone had much experience with the live amplifier functionality? Is it good enough to use for amature type live performances when piped through a sound system?
-Pete
Soccer Goal Plans
I remember when I got my first copy of MS Office (for the PC) in 1993. It came with 5 thick manuals - it took up over a foot of shelf space - documenting every minute feature of the program. As a software trainer, the information was pretty useful. However, I also realized that at least $100 of the price of the software was just the printing and distribution costs of the manuals.
As much as I still enjoy learning about all the esoteric features of software, I have to admit that most consumers neither desire nor need that level of documentation. Unfortunately, some third-party manuals are insufficient. On the other hand, good third-party manuals often exceed what you can expect from the software publisher.
Apple's going with PDF documentation for the consumer space. But in the Pro space, they still ship manuals. I'd have to drop a Final Cut Pro box on a shipping scale to know exactly how much the thing weighs, but it's about 4 inches of paper manuals - two volumes - and keyboard shortcut templates. This actually makes sense, the margins on iLife can't be that big, certainly not big enough to pay for printing a 200 page manual.
It passes the 'heft' test nicely, but not the Christmas Morning test (nothing rattles).
Veteran, Bermuda Triangle Expeditionary Force, 1992-1951