Betalogue

GarageBand 2.0 suffers from sometimes annoying limitations when it comes to using the keyboard cursor keys to move notes up or down. First of all, the cursor keys can only be used for moving notes up or down when you are in “Notation” view, i.e. looking at the actual notes on a staff in the track editor pane.

If you are in “Graphic” view, showing the notes as little rectangles of various lengths and shades of grey, then the cursor keys don’t work for moving notes up or down. They are actually used to go from track to track. I am not sure it’s a very smart idea on Apple’s part to have a different behaviour in “Graphic” view. It seems to me that they could have kept the shortcuts for moving notes in both views and defined different shortcuts for going from track to track.

In other words, if you want to use the keyboard to move notes, you need to switch to “Notation” view first. But even then, things don’t work exactly as expected. For example, if you select notes while in “Graphic” view and then switch to “Notation” view, the notes are still selected, but the cursor keys won’t work. You have to deselect the notes and then select them again in order to be able to use the cursor keys.

And then for some strange reason you can only use the Down key to go down at first. It’s only once you’ve moved the notes down that you can use the Up key to move them back up. But you cannot go higher than the original position. I have no idea why.

This entry was posted by Pierre Igot on Tuesday, July 26th, 2005 at 11:05 am and is filed under GarageBand, Music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.