Here are 5 reasons to drop $5 on a 5/5 piece of software.

A Truly Mobile Workstation

GarageBand for iOS transforms your device, be it an iPad, iPhone or iPod Touch into a completely mobile music workstation. Not only do you have access to a selection of beautiful-sounding instruments (more on those later) but also a sequencer for constructing loops and full tracks.

Once you’ve recorded a section you’re happy with, hitting the sequencer button (always in the top left) will automatically place your newly recorded sample in the timeline. From here you can trim, squeeze, loop and move your recording around with ease thanks to the responsive touch interface.

The sequencer, workflow and control scheme are effortlessly simple to work with. You might find yourself leaving for work at 8am and by the time you’ve got into the office you’ll have half a masterpiece composed (provided you’re not driving, of course).

Simple Or Complex – You Decide

Whether you’re completely new to the world of creating music or you’ve written a few symphonies in your spare time, GarageBand allows you to decide the amount of effort you’d like to put in. This means you can use “Smart” instruments to simplify pattern creation, or you can keep it real and manually record all of your sounds.

This is testament to GarageBand’s broad appeal; not requiring any prior experience to jump right in. Give it to your 9 year old daughter and she’ll keep playing till the battery’s dead. Let your dad have a go and he’ll probably want an iPad – you get the picture.

The sequencer splits your track into sections, and this is by far the easiest way of working. You can specify advanced options such beats per minute (BPM), timing (e.g. 4/4) and whether you want the metronome and countdown on or off (something that iMaschine could do with).

Packed With Sounds

GarageBand puts a lot of instruments at your disposal and they are: a basic keyboard, basic drums, an audio recorder for capturing sounds from your device’s microphone (or an external source if you have the cables and setup), smart drums, smart keyboard, smart guitar, smart bass and a sampler.

The standard keyboard is by far the most dynamic of all instruments, and once selected you can choose from classic sounds like the grand piano to fuzzy bass synthesizers and wailing 50′s sci-fi tones. It’s a lot of fun – especially in “pitch” mode.

The smart instruments are there to give you a leg-up and simplify the process. Smart drums invites you to arrange different elements, such as cymbals and snares, onto a grid which then generates a beat. Move the icons around to change the beat, repeat until happy. Similarly smart bass, smart guitar and smart keyboard make it easier to create grooves and play chords.

The sampler is another interesting bit of kit. It allows you to record a sound, trim and edit before playing it back using the keyboard for a higher or lower pitch. Apple Loops can be added directly from the sequencer and include a few hundred loops, melodies and vocal samples to keep you happy for a while, and you can always add your own via File Sharing in iTunes.

Connect & Export

One “instrument” I didn’t mention in the previous section is the guitar amp. This allows you to plug your guitar into your device and try out a selection of classic amps. Of course, you can record sections and drop them straight into your timeline with ease. To connect a guitar you’ll need the Griffin GuitarConnect cable, which costs around $30 and works with a lot of other apps (it also allows you to connect a keyboard or bass guitar).

Once you’ve created a song it’s easy to share via email or iTunes, plus you can even export in GarageBand format and continue your masterpiece on your Mac computer at home.

Endless Possibilities

And now onto the real reason why GarageBand is worth $5 – the possibilities for creating music are literally endless. Whether you’re after a workstation to create whole songs using external samples and a guitar, a live performer who can make use of one of the many sounds and instruments or a newbie to the music creation scene then GarageBand will fit the bill.

The range of included sounds are broad enough to tackle nearly any genre of music and that means you’re only limited by your imagination. If there’s one thing GarageBand ensures it’s that you’re not limited by your ability, and that’s what makes it so fun.

Conclusion

So is this app really a serious contender in the music making world? Well, yes and no. There are plenty of reasons a mobile music workstation would appeal to a budding musician, and GarageBand will satisfy many for this reason. Don’t expect a thousand dollar studio production suite, but prepare for a pleasant surprise.

Add the fact that the app hasn’t crashed once in the 10+ hours I have used it, I’d probably still be smiling had I paid $20. Buy it.

Download: GarageBand for iOS @ App Store

Have you bought GarageBand for iOS? Have you made any music on your iDevice? Share your thoughts and musical masterpieces in the comments below!

Thankfully, with version 1.1, that is isn’t a problem anymore. They made some minor tweaks to the user interface to make the app compatible with a smaller screen. Since the app is universal, users who have already purchased it on the iPad will now be able to download it free of charge.

In addition to adding iPhone support the new version also brings some improvements. They added some improvements in terms of available time signatures. The app now supports 3/4 and 6/8 signatures.

On top of some new signatures, you can also change settings for how you export songs to AAC and AIFF formats, giving further customization to the music making process. For touch instruments, you can now adjust the velocity for a little more fine tuning. The last change is the addition of custom chords for Smart Instruments.

The updated version is available for $4.99 for new users and free for current owners of the original version in the iTunes app store.  If you decide to get it, let us know in the comments what you think of it.

Source: Mashable

The growth of technology contributes so much to the vocabulary expansion of modern people’s language. I still remember the first time I read ‘google’ as a verb. It was a sentence in one Sunday newspaper article explaining about how one technology journalist found materials for his writing.

We have hordes of newly invented words from the technological world entering the dictionary all the time. One of them is “podcast“. One dictionary defines podcast as:

An audio broadcast available as an MP3 file that you can play on a portable music player, such as an iPod, or on a computer.

The thing that didn’t even exist a decade ago, now can be found almost everywhere with almost any topic imaginable ranging from small talks, light jokes, breaking news, tutorials, to university lectures by well-known professors.

Podcasting

Some people never know about the production side of how to create a podcast. Some don’t even want to know, because they think about all of the difficulties that lurk behind it. But actually, creating podcasts can be fun. And any Mac user armed with Garageband could learn how to create a professional-quality podcast as easy as creating a ringtone for iPhone.

Open Garageband and pick “Podcast” from the New Project and click “Choose”.

You will have to tell the app where you want to save the project.

There are three pre-set tracks ready: Male Voice, Female Voice, and Jingles; and basically, all you have to do is drag and drop the jingles to accompany your voice.

Let’s start with the fun part: exploring the jingles. Click the Loop Browser and choose Podcast Sound View. You’ll have tons of ready-made jingles, stingers and sound effects that you can use by dragging and dropping them to the “Jingles” track.

While I can safely say I understand what jingles and sound effects are, I still don’t know what stingers are. My best guess is (CMIIW) that they are things that you put before, during or after a short talk in order to emphasize it.

You can add as many Jingles track as you need. The easiest way to do so is by duplicating it (Track –> Duplicate or Command + D).

And then, the voice recording. Click on the track (Male or Female Voice) and click on the record button below.

There are many factors that determine the quality of the recording, but two of the most essential are the quality of the microphone and the recording environment. So, invest in a good microphone and do your podcasting in a place with minimum distractions.

Don’t forget to put a face to your podcast. You could use a picture from the iPhoto library for this purpose. Open the media browser from the right pane and choose “Photos”. Browse around to find the one that you like (or the one that you’ve prepared before), drag and drop it to the empty Episode Artwork box.

To change the name, just click on the “podcast track” bar above

and write down the title on the information pane on the left.

Broadcasting

Broadcasting comes right after the podcast production process. Garageband provides you with several alternatives in the Share menu. You could send the podcasts to iTunes (before submitting them to iTunes Music Store), to iWeb, or save it (hard drive, USB or any other kind of storages).

We have discussed a little about building websites using iWeb. Adding Garageband-made Podcasts to enhance iWeb-made sites is as easy as clicking a menu.

You could get more information on submitting your podcast to iTunes Music Store on this page.

Garageband is one of the tools that can help you create great quality of podcasts easily and at the same time having fun doing it. While there are still so many things that we can discuss about Podcasting using Garageband, I hope this short article could help you to get started in the Podcasting world.

Have you tried podcasting? Do you know other podcasting tools? Share using the comment below.

I was very proud to own the gadget that cost me a few months of my salary, because only a few people could afford cellphones in those days, and not all cellphones from that era could play monophonic ringtones. Most could only beep.

Now, the ringtone technology has gone way beyond monophonic. Polyphonic is also outdated. Even cheap China-made phones used by the street fruit and vegetable sellers – who walk the damp narrow alleys of poor third-world countries – can use MP3 songs as the ringtones.

While you could buy ringtones for your cellphones if you want to, creating one feels more rewarding. As a bonus, you could show off to friends and relatives your unique ringtones that nobody else has. And if you use an iPhone, your path to being able to create one of your own ringtones is very clear.

Grabbing goods from Garageband

Maybe there are many Mac users who are not aware that they have a tool to create their own quick and unique iPhone ringtones: Garageband. This easy to use music creation software comes free with every purchase of a Mac unit as part of the iLife suite.

To create your own ringtone using the latest version of Garageband – v ’09, you just have to choose the “iPhone Ringtone” menu from the start up screen, then choose either Example Ringtone (to use and edit pre-made sample), Loops (to use and build a new one using Apple Loops) and Voice (to user your own voice as the ringtone).

The next step would be giving a name to this project and choosing the place to save it. Unless you speak music language, I suggest that you not meddle with the song adjustments (tempo, signature, and key). And actually you don’t need to because we wouldn’t deal with complicated song building anyway.

For those who chose Example Ringtone, you’ll see the 17 second sample. Click the play button to listen to it. Should you want to use it, you could export it as a ringtone (more on this later).

The same thing applies if you choose Loops. But here you could enhance your tone by adding more loops from the loop library on the right pane.

Recording your own voice

Voice option will give you two pre-configured tracks: Male basic and Female basic so you don’t have to adjust anything to optimize the recording.

There are many other voice configurations available from the track info pane on the right.

You’ll also have an alloted 20 second loop to use, but you could adjust this by dragging the end of the yellow loop bar to the time position that you’d like.

Actually, the one that we call the ringtone could be anything from a standard song to a spoken word. If you have a deep broadcaster voice, for example, you can just speak out your own ringtone. But Voice option is also a good place to start if you could sing (or not) and want to record a mini-choir of yourself as the ringtone. Garageband allows its users to create songs from many tracks like Voice 1, Voice 2, Voice 3 etc.

To add tracks, go to Track –> New Track menu or use Command + Option + N

Using songs from iTunes

I personally would like to choose part of an existing song from iTunes as the ringtone. So after the main Garageband window opens, I’ll just delete the existing track (Command + Delete) and choose the Media Browser from the lower right corner of the window.

Then I dragged and dropped a song from the list to the main pane.

The song was converted into Garageband track and ready to be edited.

To determine which part of the song will be converted into a ringtone, I adjusted the loop bar to the position that I prefer. This loop bar time should be 40 seconds or less.

Exporting to ringtone

To export the part of the song into the ringtone, I went to Share –> Send Ringtone to iTunes menu.

Another conversion and export process will take place and…

The ringtone will be placed under the ‘Ringtone’ folder in iTunes as a m4r file and will automatically be synchronized to iPhone the next time it connected.

Non-iPhone users could also use Garageband to create their own mp3 ringtones, but that process requires a different method and enough to be written as another article for another time.

Have you tried to use Garageband to create iPhone ringtones? Share your opinions using the comments below!

Since a package of iLife comes free with every purchase of a new Mac, and iTunes is also available for free download — I think it’s safe to assume that every Mac user uses (and loves) at least one of the iLife apps.

Always hungry

But there’s one common problem among iLife applications that most users will find rather annoying: the applications take up lots, and lots of storage space. In this article, I will show you how to transfer your iLife suite and access it from an external hard drive, freeing up precious hard disk space on your computer.

What takes up all this space? Even an amateur wannabe photographer like me can stack up over 15 gigabytes (!) worth of digital photos in my iPhoto library. There are also tens of gigabytes of loops, artist lessons, and project files in Garageband; another huge chunk reserved by iMovie project files; and don’t forget iTunes songs collection. (A fraction of my ‘small’ music library is shown below).

With today’s hard drive capacity, this storage deficiency problem shouldn’t be something to worry about. But not everybody’s Mac is equipped with a “large enough” storage capacity, not everybody needs Garageband or iMovie, not everybody listens to each and every MP3 all the time, and not everybody – especially the ones with MacBooks (or older generations Mac laptops) – wants to dump everything in their local hard drive.

I personally would not stop taking digital pictures.

It would be nice if we could move (some of) those large data to another location, wouldn’t it? Unfortunately, users can not just “cut and paste”. Special ‘tricks’ are necessary to preserve the database.

Moving iPhoto library
To move your iPhoto to an external hard disk, you first need to reveal the iPhoto library. It’s located in the ~/Pictures folder. Drag and drop it to a new location. The process could take several minutes to hours, depending on how big your library is.

For iPhoto ’06 and ’08 users, open the iPhoto application while holding down the Option key, then locate the library on the external hard disk.

For iPhoto ’09 users, rename the “iPhoto Library” in the computer’s hard drive to “iPhoto Library Old” before opening iPhoto. Then, iPhoto will show a dialog box where you can choose which library to open. After choosing the new library, you can delete (or keep) the old one.

Please note that if you move your iPhoto library to an external hard drive it has to be connected before launching iPhoto. The same goes for every other application.

Moving iTunes Library
Launch iTunes while holding down the Option key. A small window will open, asking you whether to locate the library or create a new one.

Choose “Create Library” and put the new library in the location you prefer.

Go to File –> Library –> Consolidate Library menu. This step will copy all of your music files (from the old library) to the new library while retaining the ratings, playlists and any other information tagged to the files.

Then you can delete the old iTunes Music Folder, but you should not delete the iTunes library files.

For more detailed information, please refer to this Apple’s iTunes Support Page.

Moving Garageband
Moving Garageband (and all the loops and data) is not recommended because the process of composing and editing within Garageband requires fast access to all the data. And if you really have to move them, the process itself is not easy and requires tinkering with terminal command (as described here). You might also find this discussion to be helpful.

There was an old application called “Garageband Anywhere” which made the process of moving Garageband easy, but I failed to find any download source for the app. And since this app was dated back to 2005, there’s no guarantee that it would be compatible with the latest Mac OS X and Garageband.

Moving iMovie data
Moving iMovie’s data is done from within iMovie. The one that consumes the most disk space is the Event.

First, you have to connect the drive where you want to move the data to, open iMovie, then you can move your data to the new location by dragging and dropping them in the left pane.

Please note that the drive should be formatted as Mac OS X Extended and connected to the computer via Firewire. For more detailed information, please refer to this Apple’s iMovie Support Page.

That’s all. Hopefully, that has helped you free up hundreds of gigabytes of space. If you have personal experiences or other tips regarding this topic (especially about moving Garageband), please share using the comment below.