Garageband 2 review

GarageBand broke new ground when it was launched a year ago, making music creation easier and more enjoyable than most of us ever thought possible.

GarageBand 2 builds on that starting point, narrowing the gap between hobbyist and professional even further. Making anything from a little ditty through to simultaneous multi-track recordings, complete with automatic, editable notation is possible. The best part? It's just as easy as before - even easier in places.

To start off with, there's a digital tuner for guitars and similar instruments. When selected, it appears in place of the track time display, and shows the pitch of a played note along with a guide to its tuning accuracy; flats and sharps show as drifts left or right of the middle green bar. If your ear is good and you're fairly practiced, this may not be that much use, but it can help get a few instruments on target without fuss.

Once tuned up, the new multiple-track recording feature means up to eight different audio tracks (live external input such as guitars, vocals, drums and so on) plus a software instrument (Midi input) can be recorded simultaneously. This means no more having to lay things down track by track: bands can capture each musician's efforts at once, or you can simply play guitar and sing to separate tracks. You'll need an external USB or FireWire audio interface to get the additional inputs, but Apple says any Mac OS X-compatible devices will work with GarageBand 2.

The automatic notation is an exciting new feature. If you use a Midi device to record Software Instrument tracks, your efforts can be shown in traditional notation form instead of the old 'piano roll' form. Just play, and GarageBand writes your score with time signatures, key and clef signs all inserted automatically. You can go back and edit your music note by note or whole selections at a time, and the notation structure is redrawn on the fly. Even if you don't sight-read music, this feature is seriously useful. It isn't perfect, however, as you can't print or export the music notation in any way. This will certainly disappoint anyone hoping to use it to produce scores for use outside of GarageBand, but it's still extremely useful.

You can now change the key or pitch of Real Instrument tracks and Apple Loops as well as Midi simply by dragging a slider. Pitch can also be set at the master track level at multiple points through a song, and you can change the overall tempo, slowing down playback to 50% or speeding it up to 200% without affecting the pitch. Of course, extreme changes will start to affect the sound of non-Midi audio, but it's a great ability to have at your fingertips. You can also apply tuning and timing enhancements to tracks to snap slightly off-target performances back into line, and this can be applied to recordings and imported audio as well as software instruments. Added to the extensive range of effect presets are some specifically for tweaking recorded singing in subtle (Live Performance, Female Basic, and so on) or not-so-subtle (Mouse Voice, Helium Breath) ways, and each preset can be opened up and tweaked to your heart's content.

Once you've sorted out an awkward musical passage, you can save it as an Apple Loop and add it to the GarageBand loop library. You can name it, specify a scale, genre and set multiple 'mood descriptors' to help track it down in the future, and if you save it as a loop item rather than a 'one-shot' library item it will automatically conform to the tempo of the song when you use it.