Originally conceived as pure music production software, GarageBand experienced a metamorphosis to the podcasting studio with its latest version jump. Even when you open the program, it is noticeable that additional options are available: podcast and movie to music. In contrast to conventional music production, hardly any basic knowledge is required here. Tracks for speakers – male or female – as well as for jingles and effect sounds are already available preset. There are new voice editing effects for voice recordings, such as radio speakers male or female, but their effects are not capable of miraculous.
Professional jingles and sound effects provide the basic equipment for serious podcasts. Whether from the fields of electro, jazz, cinema music or orchestral sounds – almost every sound backdrop is available in good production quality and in up to three different running times. A total of 200 jingles are available, but these are likely to be worn out in the world. Under Stinger and sound effects, the podcaster also receives additional sound effects such as applause, rain, birdchirion, but also cartoon sounds.
Integrating media
You can create audio-only podcast episodes with and without tags, images and URL addresses, as well as video podcasts. The operation succeeds intuitively. Similar to iMovie, a media center for audio files, photos, and movies is now integrated, from which content can be dragged and dropped into the podcast track. For example, the duration of viewing photos must be determined precisely at one-thousandth of a second. When a movie is set to music, GarageBand automatically disconnects video and audio tracks when importing, so that speaker voices, effects, and volume changes can be made in a few simple steps.
Export podcasts
Exporting a podcast is very easy, with the target applications iTunes or iWeb directly available. The export to iTunes is self-explained and to iWeb you don't come quite as elegant, but nevertheless the export was cleverly solved. Because iWeb already provides page topics for podcasts, the podcasts are automatically integrated as a new episode, so that ultimately only the addition of a description and publishing to the web are necessary.
Conclusion
For musicians, GarageBand 3 will not include any new products. Apple's focus was clearly on creating a podcasting software that is as easy to use as iTunes. And for this goal, the music program was a perfect base. At first glance, the solution looks round. In the test, we were able to create an extended video podcast within less than an hour without any prior knowledge and publish it on the web via iWeb. It can't be better. The image sizes and video formats can be defined in many ways via GarageBand settings. This provides a small video and sound studio that is not limited to podcasting alone. Only the sometimes considerable latency in the voice recording caused us problems. By the next issue, however, we will have analyzed the problem and will be able to rewrite it in more detail.
