Betalogue

Strange limitations when it comes to using cursor keys to move notes up or down in GarageBand 2.0.

A tip to use the Tab key as a sustain pedal, even with a USB controller.

It happens to me from time to time, so I am going to assume that it also happens to other people… The situation is that you are working on a GarageBand project with multiple tracks, and two of the tracks are using the same software instrument (a generic piano sound or drum kit, for example). […]

As noted in another post a while back, when no project window is open in GarageBand 2, you get this proprietary window with two buttons (“Create a New Project” and “Open an Existing Project“). It’s bad enough that we get this non-standard behaviour. What makes it worse is that it’s so poorly implemented. First, there […]

In GarageBand 1.x, if you were in the middle of playing a song and wanted to save it, as soon as you hit command-S, GarageBand would stop playing the song. No longer in GarageBand 2. You can now save your song at any time without interfering with song playback. It’s a small thing, but it’s […]

This is a rather annoying bug and, as far as I can recall, it was introduced in GarageBand 2. Version 1.x didn’t suffer from it. It happens when you select a note in a software instrument loop and try to drag it to the very end of the loop. Take the following note for example: […]

GarageBand has two basic playing modes: normal and cycling. In normal mode, when you press the Space bar or click on the “Play” button, GarageBand plays the song starting from where the playhead currently is. In cycling (or looping) mode, a specific section of the song is highlighted in yellow in the beat ruler and, […]

This happens to me quite regularly. I have a project open in GarageBand and have been working on it for quite a while. It has a number of tracks (possibly 10 or more), many of them software instruments. The last time I worked on it before switching to another application and doing something else, it […]

A while back, I wrote about the problems with the single-window interface used in GarageBand. In a nutshell, one fundamental problem is that GarageBand still uses the “document window” paradigm — complete with Close, Minimize, and Maximize buttons in the window’s title bar and with a “Window” menu in the menu bar — even though […]

For all standard Mac OS X windows, including regular “Aqua” windows and so-called brushed-metal windows, the behaviour is the same: When the window is not in the foreground, the drop shadow around it becomes much less pronounced, with less depth and a much more subtle look. It’s intended to give a sense of perspective, with […]

In essence, GarageBand is a tool that lets you visually edit music. As such, GarageBand is, in several aspects, a drawing tool. It lets you select notes, move them around, adjust the distance between them, etc. Because of this, when editing a loop, I often find myself looking for a command that is not there […]

As someone with limited experience in music making, using GarageBand to create music by trying to reproduce “musical ideas” that I might have in my head has already taught me quite a few things. One of the most important ones is probably how rhythm is so much more than just a matter of timing. We […]

This is a perfectly example of how Apple manages to screw up even the most basic stuff when putting out new software that has been supposedly built from scratch and should at the very least comply with the most fundamental standards of UI design. If you have a music file open in GarageBand and press […]

If you have a GarageBand composition that you want to save as a sound file, the only way to do it is to use the “Export to iTunes” command, which is not customizable and gives you no choice but to add the sound file to your iTunes library as an AIFF recording. It would be […]

With GarageBand, Apple has once again strayed away from their own interface standards. The document window is neither a standard Aqua window nor a brushed-metal window — but some kind of plastic-wood hybrid window. Obviously, the intent is to mimic the look of actual studio gear. I am not necessarily against it, in so far […]