I launched Garage­band for the first time in a few years. That’s how it seems to me, anyway. I played around with the appli­ca­tion at some point in the past but it never became the focus of a per­sonal music hobby. Recently, I was asked by a client to either find or pro­vide some back­ground music for an ani­mated pre­sen­ta­tion. I find it very dif­fi­cult to find free music loops online (most of them are now either share­ware or “linkware”, and this client is usu­ally not willing to accept those kind of terms) so I decided to give Garage­band another try.

The most imme­di­ately useful things for me are the music loops. The default install didn’t include very many, but the appli­ca­tion imme­di­ately asked me if I wanted to “com­plete” the appli­ca­tion instal­la­tion by down­loading addi­tional con­tent from Apple. This turned out to be about a giga­byte worth of addi­tional free music loops. This was very helpful.

The other thing that really impressed me is the music editor. The appli­ca­tion will gen­erate a “sheet music” view of the cur­rent track (a pre-packaged loop or a recorded soft­ware instru­ment) that can be very easily manip­u­lated. As a former musi­cian (does anyone ever stop being a musi­cian?) I def­i­nitely favor this view. The con­trols are intu­itive (arrow keys to raise or lower a note or move it to a dif­ferent mea­sure) and very respon­sive. Track editing was sim­i­larly easy to figure out. In a matter of a few hours I was able to put together a music track that should serve the needs of my cur­rent project. The expe­ri­ence has also rekin­dled my interest in computer-aided musical com­po­si­tion. I might have to think about this after my port­folio web­site is completed.