Re: Accompaniment & Effects Practice Box

"icarusi" <icarusi00@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:bsqdnXUWNdrce6LVRVnyiwA@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
"Woody" <usenet@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:6a9r2lF35rb52U1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

No, it is an audio program that was never meant to have any midi functions.
A lot of people critizise garage band as it is slow and has some odd restrictions, but for a 'free' (or free with other things) application I think it is great. I wish something like that was available when I started, I would have used it to death but back then computers didn't come with free multitrack audio recorders and software instrument players. In fact in general they didnt do much more than beep!

I agree from the very olden days, but there've been lite versions of the big audio programs around for ages, some free which work in a more consistent way.

I don't know if they are necessarily more consistant, or if you just get used to them.
From way back until recently I used to use cubase, but it has never been
really consistant, although it has not been free either, so I don't know which ones you are refering to.

Why is there no track vertical zoom for instance? Why isn't 'mute' icon a speaker with a line or x through it (standard on virtually every remote control and not a GB alone criticism Vegas has something else)?

I can't remember what it is offhand as I use logic, but I don't recal ever having a problem knowing a track was muted in garage band? I am not so worried what the icon is as long as I know what it means.
The vertical zoom would be handy, although I would have thought its most pressing problem was of performance rather than interface, although there is possibly another issue as to why it doesn't look like everything else.

I am stuck with that mouse unfortunately. Normally I just throw the apple mouse away and use a logitech one (the last computers mouse is still in the plastic), but that stupid ball thing on the new one is really good, and nothing else seems to have it. Otherwise I hate the mouse!

I miss the right button giving me contextual help. Most Windo$e programs adopt the text labels or explanations if you hover the cursor over a button but not all Mac buttons have this, 'views' in Finder for instance. They're not consistent with icons vs text either. The dock only has icons and no text until you 'cursor hover', but open windows only have text and no icon, all in samey grey.

I don't get what you mean by 'open windows'? normal finder windows? They can have icons and text, or just text, whichever you want.

At least Finder has both icons and text.

So you dont mean finder windows above?

It is true that consistancy on the mac has gone down a lot since OSX.

I wouldn't scratch around, it is a personal preference thing. I have to use windows for a living, I am a windows programmer, but I certainly wouldnt choose to use it at home. My macbook pro has gone away for a repair and I am stuck using windows until it gets back. I am counting the minutes!

It took me few minute to get back into the Windo$e ways after half a day on a Mac. I thought it looked good but wasn't as 'simplified' as I was expecting in an 'easy to use' way, although the 'help' features, especially the online vids (assuming you were broadband online, less good if you couldn't be online or on dial-up) were very good, often you *had* to use them. I couldn't often *guess* my way round some simple things, because of peculiarities.

I found it less easy to get into the dirty areas when something didn't work as expected.

In any system that obviously takes more knowledge. macosxhints.com is a good source for that.

The owner had snarfed in camera video footage which was duly showing up in iMovie. Some of his other footage was absent. When I checked in Finder there were Quicktime copies of his avi's which showed up in iMovie but the absent footage had no QT copies. Fairly obvious that iMovie only deals in QT format (although iDVD 'sees' avis, don't know if they can be directly, use but assume so).

There is a plugin called perian <http://perian.org/> which adds a whole host of formats to quicktime, such as flash and many of the avi codecs. It is worth getting, especially as it is free.

I did manage to 'manually' convert one of the avis (but couldn't find a batch converter) which duly showed up in iMovie,

ffmpeg, visual hub, one of those programs will batch convert files. There are obviously a lot of commercial ones.

I know Move Maker does a similar stunt by converting all to wmv, but something like Vegas (later versions at least) take any old video format at editing stage and only 'conform' them at rendering stage

As I say, with the perian plugin you can add a lot more formats and wouldn't have this as an issue. It will read anything that quicktime will read.

. I'm surprised that iMovie and iDVD aren't integrated together.

In what way? They sort of are connected, in the way everything is. The output of iMovie can be accessed in iDVD from the media browser, and just dropped where you want them. iDVD will use chapter markers in from iMovie (or is that just a final cut thing?).

Trying to explain all this stuff to a novice is worthwile, but from the hype I wasn't expecting to have needed to.

you should never believe the hype!

--
Woody

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