Saturday, December 1, 2012

Apple GarageBand '11 - Smelly and Awful

I don't just dislike GarageBand '11, I farking hate it.  Where previously GarageBand had been an extremely useful tool, it's now extremely intrusive on the audio levels of the mixed tracks and this makes it nearly useless.  It smells and I hate it.

It took some while to understand why I was having such trouble getting the audio levels out of the guitar that I was expecting and the change in GarageBand is the reason for it.  I was driving the signal from the guitar into GarageBand as hot as it could go without clipping (i.e. flashing those nasty red peak lights) but the signal would disappear or at least be greatly subdued in the overall mix.  GarageBand never behaved this way previously so it took a while before I realized what was doing it.

There is a marginal correction one can make and that's to turn on 'ducking' for your song.  This is a procedure one can use to assign audio priority to one track over another or multiple others.  I'm still deeply-suspicious of how much GarageBand plays with the mix of the tracks over and above what I have specified in my controls but I've got no particular reason to go on an all-out snipe hunt as I've only got the one instrument here whereas previously I was playing many.  And, yes, I do miss them but that's ok.

It may be the answer is to switch to Apple's Logic but that would mean upgrading it, re-learning it, etc. I don't have the money for that and really I couldn't be bothered.  That's not fatalism or defeatism as with one instrument there's no point in going to sophisticated recording software even if I do tricky stuff with the way I play it.

The positive side of what appears to be a quite hateful article is that I got the Boss RC-50 looper working last night.  It was no big technical deal as I just needed an extension cord but I hadn't previously been able to find one.  Thank you to the scooter on that.

The result of getting the looper going is that I may bag the back tracks altogether.  Although they give me a big fat sound that I like a lot, the looper is a whole different adventure and I enjoy that very much as well.  More to come as I'll experiment with that over the next few days and we'll see how it works out.

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