Blog Relations

Now that I’m a “Mac User” I thought I had better get round to using Garage Band, Apple’s audio software and part of its iLife set that comes with the computer. It’s particularly good for multi-tracking and mixing in music and sound effects.The first fruit of my long labours with it can be heard over at Storynory.

At first I was baffled by Garage Band, and ended up investing 30 quid in the official Apple Book about it by Mary Plummer. The price of those books really hurts, but at least it told me what to do. Once I got into it, I discovered that there is a really nice collection of high quality music and Sound FX loops. But you can always do with more of a good thing, so I bought a couple of cheap Jingle Bells tracks for Bertie’s Christmas story. In the interests of taste, I used them fairly minimally, so that the episode didn’t sound like a shopping centre.

Apple had a more subtle “holiday bells” loop and some nice cinematic music, giving a Hollywood effect of sorts, along with bird song, footsteps, etc. In places I had four tracks going, including the narrator’s voice.

What I like:

You can master each track separately: so I could choose “female voice” for the narrator, and “jingles” for the music. This seems to make a big difference.

You have very good control of the volume dynamics of each track. Press “a” and you see a blue band beneath it. You can alter its shape to draw a fade in and fade out.

The sound loops that come with it really are top quality.

Once its exported and encoded as an Mp3 in iTunes, it sounds like high quality stuff. Encoding tracks mastered in other software in iTunes has never worked well for me.

What I don’t like:

The sound editor is very hard to use for precision edits. As I’ve said before. SoundForge is way ahead of the game in this respect.

As far as I can tell, you can’t export as a WAV file, which would be nice for making CDs. I think you can only get the project out as compressed MPEG or ACC.

It crashed several times and put my my highish spec Mac into a spin. Don’t believe the enthusiasts who say that Mac never crashes. It does, and I couldn’t even power the damn thing down, and had to pull the battery out.

–
You can also make an ‘enhanced’ podcast with different pictures for each chapter showing up in the iTunes / iPod window. This will end up as an MPEG 4 file (.4a). I’m still not sure if this plays on every machine out there, so stuck with MP3 audio only for now.

I was up into the wee hours doing this, and had big christening party for young Misha this weekend, so a very bleary Monday morning. I’m not sure whether I can do this every time, but will certainly be mixing music and sound effects into storynories for special occasions.