Mac IBook, Garage Band and M-Audio

[j-raj]

I pretty much only record with GB, it's everything I need, why change?

That's absolutely reassuring!!! I like the tunes that you have up there on iComposition. Have you heard the cat that does a remix of Portrait of Tracy? Kinda interesting (It's called "Jacobeat"), it's up on iC.

I'm going to pop at least 512 more RAM. What are good places to purchase RAM on the internet. I went to 'Ramjet.com' a while back when I was looking for RAM for the G3/500...

How are you mixing down the tracks?

I was just curious because I just dragged and dropped the tune that I was working on into iTunes and it did the conversion itself.

Was that the most efficient way to do it?

Who makes Reason? I know that I have hear my friends using it, but I'm not sure what it does.

 

[Wrong Robot]

Yea, that jacobeat thing has been there for a while, it's pretty neat, definitely creative.

Ramjet is a good place to get ram
Crucial is a good place to get ram
newegg.com is a good place to get ram

find out *exactly* what type of RAM your 12" needs, and then shop from there. Sometimes there are different types of notebook memory, SO-dimms, regular dimms, 193 pins, 210 pins..blah blah.

whatever you do, *DO NOT BUY RAM FROM APPLE!* it's hideously overpriced, apple sells at a fixed rate, so when the market adjusted itself a couple years ago, apple never did, leaving them in the dust.

"export to iTunes" is the only way to bounce down tracks as of now, that creates a single .aif file that you can convert to .mp3, .wav .aac .mp4 or whatever in iTunes. If you drag and drop the .band file into iTunes, you'll end up with all the separate .aif tracks.

also if you right click(control+click) on the .band file and do "show package contents" you can manually extract .aif tracks if you wanted to load them all into another program, but then I don't think they'd have their effects on them, because of the way GB handles effects is geared towards increased versatility.

Reason is made my Propellorhead software, It's a $300 Software based Synthesizer, Mixer, Sampler, Drum machine, and sequencer. It has unlimited Expandability (need another synth, just create one) comes with a ton of effects, and "rewire" technology which enables you to use Reason as a software "slave" instrument in Programs like Protools, Cubase, Logic, Garageband...etc.

Reason is an amazing program for sure, and I have heard some great music made solely with it, but it's limitations are that, all the stock sounds are mostly cheap midi(whereas Garageband is custom and very high quality midi), the effects aren't very good(whereas GB has some of hte best effects I've ever heard from software) the sequencer is abysmal(though Gb's isn't much better), it's incredibly proprietary and has a steep learning curve(GB is mostly open standards, or compliant, and you can pretty much master it in 30 minutes)

Reason is unable to record live audio, whereas GB gives you unlimited tracks of midi and live audio.(as much as your computer can handle)

Reason is a great program for sure, but ultimately, ever since I got Garageband last year I've only used reason maybe twice.

 

[fretlessrock]

I saw a comment about reducing latency. The answer is actually posted before the question, but I dealt with it on a slightly different setup as well. I was running a G3/700 iBook and Logic 5 with a MAudio Firewire 410. I also ran a MOTU 828 for a while. Definitely do NOT use plug-in effects while recording, even compression, if you want maximum tracks and minimum latency. If you have a lot of horespower it isn't a problem, but when you get down to the G3, or machines with under 512MB of RAM, then your best bet is to record the tracks raw, and deal with effects later (or use outboard gear).

I should be running a G4/1ghz iBook by this time next week, and will be using a MOTU 896HD on the front end. I'm looking forward to checking out GarageBand, as I was a user of ACID/Vegas under windoze and like having a setup that let me do fast projects using loops.

Pete