While GarageBand has been out as long as the G5 (and yes, I’ve been salivating over that G5 for a while), I didn’t break down and buy iLife for the longest time. First, I’d been planning to get the Mrs. a new Mac for ages, and since she’d get the new OS (Panther aka 10.3) and some other hip groovy things, we put it off. And off. And off. After all, it’d be around $2,500 for the whole deal, PC and monitor, and it’s hard to justify that when her Gen2 iMac is working. Not as fast as she’d like, but the Mrs. rarely does the complex on her beast. GarageBand is included in all new Macs, so I thought I’d wait. Why blow money on something they’re giving away?
I, on the other hand, often do the complex. Be it recording movies onto the Mac or playing with Photoshop 7. May being my birthday month, I took a day off and went to town with the Mrs. (we saw Shrek 2) and on the way home she begged to drool at the Mac Store. While there, we discussed what sort of new Mac she should get (G4 1.2 GhZ is what I’m thinking), and I broke down and admitted that while I wanted a new Mac, what I needed was an upgrade. The Mrs. pointed out that if the upgrade wasn’t overly costly (under $700), we could do it. After all, hadn’t I bought my Mac with upgrade in mind? So I went to Other World Computing, and for $600 and change got an 80G HD, 256 more megs of RAM, and the prize of prizes, a 1.3 GhZ processor card. Out with the old, in with the new. Ordered them Wednesday, got them Friday at 1 and by 3pm it was done.
And the whole purpose of this was first to make the beast (Sawtooth G4/400 in case you wondered, and yes it’s named Sawtooth) run fast enough that I could play with software and not cry. Well it worked. And come Sunday I was sitting with an extra $50 (thank you, Grandma!) and thinking “What the fuck?” After a quick chat with the Mrs. (who is, if you’ll remember, a musician), she agreed it’s an investment. And the basic software is $50. Lord knows we’ve blown more on a dinner!
So then, we said, GarageBand it is. Now, some of my PC friends gave me the stink eye and asked what the hell this was. To quote NPR “Using a $49 computer program called GarageBand and a Macintosh computer, novice musicians are now able to create sounds that only a few years ago would have required the services of an expensive studio, loads of instruments and lots of money.”
Sums it up nicely, I think.
Anyway, I’m going to bail on the office a wee bit early, if I can, and go to the Mac Store and argue with Mac Nerds about GarageBand, until they’ve sufficiently managed to par down my will power to the point that I’ll whip out my Master-Card (or Am-Ex, whatever) and pay up.
At this point people are wondering ‘What the hell are your creds, to play with music?’ I play the guitar, I’ve been known to write songs (and poetry, shoot me), and I can carry a tune in a bucket. I insist that the Mrs is the musician and I’m the laid back hippie’s daughter who likes to listen. That’s not really true, though. I like sound and music and the idea of something that can help me make it is a little appealing.
GarageBand looks like a marriage between my love of computers and my love of music. Yeah, I’m not a huge music geek like I was in High School, and part of that has to do with the transition from bad poetry to bad fiction to … well, this blog. Which all six of you read. I have a sense of humor. Laugh with me or at me, and I’ll grin. Point being, GarageBand is made for idiots like me who actually have a clue about music and computers, but aren’t as amazing as my cousins Dan or Paul. Hi, Dan! Hi, Paul!
It still galls me a little that I have to pay for something that other people get free. They’re charging almost $200 for Jam Pack (the extra bonus) and don’t get me started on what it costs for Office 2004! Fucking Micro$oft. Still, purchase it I shall do, and check in later on the blog to let you all know how it goes.