Purely by coincidence and perhaps the fact that I lug my
powerbook with me everywhere I go, I've ended up doing lots of digital media production with Apple's most excellent
iLife suite of applications.
Firstly, the big band that I play sax in, the Honeymakers, is in the process of recording a demo CD to send to prospective clients. The brief was to get something on CD, of whatever quality, and to send it out with a disclaimer of sorts about our non-professional status, the small amount of time spent rehearsing and the tiny budget available for recording.
I turned up to rehersal one week and the band director asked me if I could record the band on the powerbook. "Sure", I answered, "what sort of gear do we have?" Very little, the answer came, and we were starting right then. In fact the first cut of some tracks has been recorded using the
internal mic on the laptop as that's all we had to start with. Solos have been over-dubbed with better mics on individual tracks, but the vast majority of the band has been recorded purely with one mic.
And the software magic that made all this possible?
Garageband. It totally rocks and is oh so cheap. The effects and things available with a mere click of the trackpad are brilliant, and overdubbing solos is so simple - just whack some headphones into the headphone jack, hit record and play along. One of the other guys in the band actually recorded his tracks at his place and gave me a CD full of the results which I can just drag and drop back into the projects. Sweet.
We've done solos and the vocals with better mics, but being able to pack up the "recording studio" by unplugging a couple of cables and closing the lid just blew everyone away.
I'll post a link to the resulting mp3s as soon as I've finished mixing them down - possibly tomorrow.
Garageband also rocks my world with the other band I'm playing in at the moment - a RTA-affiliated rock band where I'm playing mainly bass guitar. I just couldn't resist making myself a little cable which runs out from my bass amp's effects send to the laptop input, then back from the output to the amp's receive line.
Using this setup, I can now run what for years has been the holy grail of guitarists every where -
real-time effects processing in software. I just click on setting for each song, which sets the reverb, compression, distortion, amp simulation, etc. to be however I want it, and there's my tone, running out the amp with
no delay.
The guitarists in the band who turn up with ten or so effects boxes and associated batteries and cabling each are very jealous.
I remember reading somewhere that Mac OS X's audio stack has latency low enough to be able to do this, but the equivalent part of Windows would never be able to achieve the same feat without some serious re-writing on Microsoft's part.
At rehersals for this band the other day, someone had the bright idea of filming the entire thing for archive/humiliation/burning. At the end of the process, I noticed it had all been done on a DV (digital) camera. One firewire cable between that camera and the trusty powerbook later, I had a pile of clips sitting in
iMovie. A bit of drag and drop later, and I have a DVD ready to burn with titles, credits and all the really bad stuff relegated to the digital trash can.
This really
is a lifestyle computer. Apple should be paying me to say this stuff :)