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Music on the Mac
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Do you
Podcast? Podcasting is the
sharing of a show or mix through itunes. Use your mac to share your mixes, music or radio show over
the web, so others can download it to their ipod and listen to it later.
iTunes is a
great way to listen to some online radio stations from around the
world. If you're the sort who
gets a rush out of others hearing you creations, you could consider setting
up and radio station on itunes.
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Do you produce your own
music? Are you an aspiring
musician or want your own recording studio? With an understanding of most musicians needs, we decided
to produce a section dedicated to you and to help you decide on what kit
you need.
Many recording studios use
Macs to carry out the labour intensive task of recording the music. With a more Efficient PowerPC
processor, Macs are able to handle more channels than an intel based PC
running at a comparitive speed.
So what do you need to really
get up and running with digital recording?
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Garageband
Produced by Apple and currently in it's third release, Garageband
is pretty processor intensive, requiring a G3 minimum, running at 600mHz-
not for the faint hearted on a mac with that speed processor and requiring
a fast hard drive and lots of memory.
With the limited number of tracks it can deal with, it's designed to
target the home user.
By producing and launching Garageband, Apple have
given many the chance to produce their own music without the costs involved
in purchasing expensive software.
Priced at £39.00, Garageband is a low cost solution to starting your
own digital audio recording studio.
The software is further simplified through the implementation of
software based instruments for recording purposes.
Garageband has been designed for the purpose of
capturing live music and as such, you will need a way of capturing audio and
transferring it to the mac.
Basically it will be necessary to boost line level noise prior to
transferring it to the mac. In
particular, input from a Microphone will have to be boosted before input
into the Mac. A pre-amp would
do this and it's best to first consider something like a microphone pre-amp
unless of course you've got your own mixing desk already.
The real downside with Garageband is that it's only
been around a couple of years.
As a result, older versions aren't available, so theres no way to
use it on a really low end mac such as blue and white G3.
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In order to use the software instruments, it's best
to consider a midi keyboard with midi in and out ports. We use a Yamaha PSR620 to input our
music to the system. To
communicate with the mac, the keyboard needs to be connected through a Midi
interface which turns the midi signals into signals for the usb port of the
mac.
System Requirements Checklist
* Macintosh
computer based around a PowerPC G3 600mHz minimum (Core software only).
* Memory: 256MB minimum (512 MB recommended)
* Operating
System: Minimum OS X (10.2.6)
* Display: a resolution of 1024x768
* Hard
Disk Space: Minimum of 4.3
gigabytes (7200rpm required)
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G4 Processor Recommended
Need a mac that
will run Garageband? Call or
email us. We can provide you
with what you need.
We recommend a G4 733mHz powermac.
£650.00
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