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."

Comments

this is great for music.

[torpor]

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.

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! :)

Re:this is great for music.

[MoneyT]

You know, Apple isn't pushing anyone out of the business. The fact that they are choosing not to compete is their own fault. It's not like they can't improve on the apps Apple is writing or make better products. Certainly you can make better video products than iMovie, better photo tools than iPhoto and better Sound Programs than garage band. People don't use the default programs just because they're default (witness VLC, despite quicktime being default on all Apple computers I know of very few mac users that don't also have VLC). The key to competeing with Apple is to make somethng better, but that also works with Apple

Apple's Documentation

[Anonymous Coward]

I realize Apple feels their programs should be simple enough to not require documentation, but they definitely should rethink that stance. The more complicated the programs get the more they require decent documentation.

Re:Apple's Documentation

[Achernar]

I might also point out (to myself) that Apple's stance of not including documentation with its products might be enhancing their reputation of "easy-to-use out of the box." Without an imposing manual through which to read, people might assume more readily that they can simply jump into a program and be able to figure it out.

Less imposing?

Doh

[pldms]

...and the frequency would be the length of the wave, i.e., wavelength

Nice article, but things like that pain me...

Forces Programmer changes as well

[Zergwyn]

I might also point out (to myself) that Apple's stance of not including documentation with its products might be enhancing their reputation of "easy-to-use out of the box." Without an imposing manual through which to read, people might assume more readily that they can simply jump into a program and be able to figure it out.

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.

Re:where's the manual?

[Achernar]

...there's no manual to explain how to use the help menu.

Actually, that's under "help" as well...

It costs less

[gnugrep]

There's also the fact that not providing any documentation costs less. In fact you can produce the documentation now as a book and people will pay $30 extra for what should come free with the software.

Re:where's the manual?

[rjung2k]

IIRC, MacOS X 10.3 ("Panther") came with a small booklet telling you how to get started with the OS -- how to use the "help" menu to learn more about information, how to reboot and repair your computer from the CD if something goes wrong, etc.

So it's not quite as bleak as you make it out to be. It's just a "play around and discover more" philosophy, instead of an "overwhelm the user with a thick manual" approach.