A Whole Lotta Nothing Matt Haughey’s Personal Blog

GarageBand’s podcasting limitations

Today I ran into the 999 measure limit in GarageBand. The app is built with music in mind, with a default of 120 beats per minute. When I dragged in a couple podcast tracks that clocked in at one hour and 14 minutes, I couldn’t hear all the way to the end and my waveforms weren’t showing up in the editor. Turns out it was too much information for GarageBand to natively display (despite that I’m on a quad processor desktop with 3Gb of RAM) and you have to turn down the beats per minute to 40. Once you do that, everything will magically work just fine.

Perhaps it’s time to upgrade to a Pro Tools rig? Garageband is kind of a silly piece of software to use.. for anything, really.

A new version of Logic (the pro app Garageband is based on) is likely to debut at NAB this week along with Final Cut Studio 6. We may even see iLife ‘07 at the same time.

Apple just announced Final Cut Studio and Soundtrack Pro is part of it.

Give SoundStudio a try. I use it quite successfully and because of its applescript support I’ve hooked it into my workflow automation.

Thanks for the tip!

Bob: Yeah, Logic is cool. But I’d disagree that GarageBand is silly. Logic is tremendous overkill for the type of person that GB is targetting.

I ran into this back when I was podcasting, and ending up setting my measures to be ridiculously long.

Jon: That is a valid point, it may be overkill.

But if one is serious about podcasting, I can’t see how they would use Garageband.

I’d say at the very least, invest in industry standard software/hardware (just a few hundred bucks can get a Pro Tools Mini that ships with Pro Tools LE) to expand control over editing, mixing, use of high-end plugins, etc.

Obviously there is a learning curve with Pro Tools LE, but it’s well worth it. I would go so far as to say Pro Tools LE is to Photoshop CS3 as Garageband is to some free paint app off of Version Tracker.

Yeah apple just realeased their new pro sound part for it and i must say that it’s very nice.

Reaper is good stuff, “Fast and powerful editing facilities” Shareware, made by the Winamp guys at cockos.com … versatile, customizable ( just checked the site) “OS X version coming Q4 2007″

(OS X Reaper beta ) http://reaper.fm/files/reaperosx0.30U.dmg

Thanks! Our church is getting into podcasting, and I could not figure this out!