Just lately, they’ve really cut down the junk. Here’s an original Mac mini from 2004 or so, which had a lot of 3rd party stuff and some trials:
http://support.apple.com/kb/SP65
Here’s a 2009 iMac, just the operating system and iLife:
http://support.apple.com/kb/SP507
No, it was never as bad as some of the PCs you see. But it did have the same problem of “why is my Application folder full of this crap?”
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I’m a musician — I compose music and play my own music on the piano — and I can’t figure out Garage Band. I can’t even tell what it is supposed to do for people.
Shortly after getting this computer (first computer I owned that could not natively boot into MacOS 9 or its predecessors), I wanted to record a session at the piano. Opened GarageBand. After 20 minutes of trying to find where the heck you record live audio in the damn thing, I quit out of it and launched SoundEdit 16 in Classic. Nowadays I use the “New Audio Recording” feature in QuickTime Player.
Garageband seems to have an enormous library of already-recorded sounds. Is GarageBand a sort of sound effects library or something, then?
I am not a traditional “sheet music” composer, i.e., I do not like to compose by drawing those bloody quarter notes half notes etc on a bar staff after banging in the key sig and time sig. But just for the sake of completeness I did not see that in there either. Admittedly I was not looking for it though.
I did, however, look for a piano-roll interface for composing music, where you click at the vertical latitude representing desired pitch and drag to the right to indicate duration, (e.g., MIDIgraphy), could not find that in there anywhere either.
I did find something about “loops”, which are apparently short little snippets of soundtrack that one is presumed to want, for some unexplained reason, to wish to set up so that they play, exactly the same, over and over. GarageBand seems to assume that the way one composes music is by assembling a whole bunch of these “loops” into an aggregate whole. And I’m guessing that that abovementioned library of prerecorded sounds is being suppied as a “raw materials for loops” sort of thing?
Is Garageband mostly for making sound tracks to video games?
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duh. Snow Leopard.
for the win! right? oh noes, i have aggravated the denizens of macland. retreat! 
Garageband is a pretty nice multi-track recording package. It can be used for looped based compositions, but it can also be used for more traditional multi-track instrument recording. I use it all the time as a sketchpad for musical ideas I have.
Typically, I’ll use some sort of drum loops to create a drum track and layer on guitars, bass and keys, if needed.
It’s certainly not Pro-Tools or Logic, but if you need relatively lightweight recording software that’s easy to use and easy to get good results, Garageband fits the bill.
Oh and since it comes bundled with Macs, the price is right too.
All the stuff you mention, Ahunter3, is in the software. The piano roll, the notation, etc.
I’m still puzzling over how someone can claim Garageband is garbage when they’ve never even used it and don’t know what it does. I’m looking at you, WarmNPrickly.
This was a response to AHunter
Your experience is very similar to mine. I opened it once years ago, and just couldn’t figure out what I was supposed to do with it. Nothing correlated with anything I know about music.
I have been looking for a MIDI piano roll program for years. At the moment, I’m still using my G3 hooked up to my Roland with Musicshop (made by a company that has been defunct for ten years). I have to search ebay for equipment to hook up just to keep this dinosaur running. I went to music stores, and the idiots just couldn’t comprehend what I wanted. This is it! Where is this program sold? Tell me it runs on Intel Macs in Leopard.
The Hand That Feeds by NIN was released as a GarageBand file a few years ago.
It is pretty cool to see how all the parts come together.
::sigh::
I really hate to burst your bubble. This program is not sold; it is FREEWARE.
It will run just fine in your Classic environment on your PowerPC Mac running Tiger.
If you want it to interact with actual real-life midi equipment, however, you really want a MacOS 8.6 environment. Native, not emulated. Think in terms of machines that still had the little round DIN-8 or DIN-9 serial ports.
Specifics, dammit, specifics. In short choppy sentences designed for Stoopid People, what do I click on to make it record ambient sound? Line In sound? And where do I compose music from a piano-roll interface?
Oh, well, that’s what I’m already using. Frankly, I’m amazed that this 15 year old system works. I just hope I don’t need another MIDI translator. It took months for one of those to turn up on ebay.
The Internet is an amazing resource: Mac - Apple
OK I’ll definitely give it a whirl and report back.
This is one of the reasons I bought a non “brand name” laptop. I got a Sager np2096 from Xoticpc. It came with nothing but Vista and some utility programs for the mobo but that’s it. The last Gateway that I bought came with a bunch of crapware as someone above has listed so the first thing I did was wipe that sucker clean and perform a fresh XP install.
Thanks to the linked tutorial, I now know how you record ambient sound / live sound in GarageBand:
New Project
select “Acoustic Instrument” & click “Choose” button
name the project and click Create
choose input source
click Record button
I maintain that “Acoustic Instrument” is not a very intuitive way to say “Record from Microphone” or “Record Live Sound”, but whatever…
That tutorial must refer to the latest / most modern version of GarageBand. I have version 2.0.2 and there’s nothing remotely like that going on…
Launch GarageBand
click “New Project” (only other button is “Open Existing Project”)
I land on a “mixer” screen with a “Grand Piano” track already created and a floating “Grand Piano” window in front of it with an onscreen keyboard.
Can’t find anywhere to select “Acoustic Instrument”
There is a “New Track” command. One option for track type is “Basic Track” with “No Effects”. I opt for that.
Can’t figure out how to ditch the unwanted Grand Piano track. Ignoring it for now.
There’s a red Record button. I click it. An unwanted metronome starts going KLACK! KLACK! KLACK! KLACK! I say “hello this is a quick test”. Click the record button again to stop recording. The vertical progress bar thingie keeps on trucking on to the right but I get a round uhhhmmm…object (?) named “No Effects” in the area it has already passed through. I click the right pointing “play” arrow which seems to double as a “stop” button. (Windows envy? Click Start to shut down?). OK. Now manuallly DRAG the progress-bar thingie back to the beginning. Click the “play” arrow button. The progress bar thingie starts moving again with an odd initial lurch, sweeping thru the “No Effects” object which I assume represents what I recorded so far, but no sound comes out of this thing. I check the Sound PrefsPane and tell it what I had already told GarageBand: to use internal mike as input sound source. Repeat entire process. This time I get playback.
Maybe it’s better now, but this is a long way from easy to use or intuitive.
Can’t find anywhere to turn off that bloody metronome.
In comparison here is how QuickTime Player records sound:
File menu ——> New Audio Recording
Click red Record button to start recording.
Click it again to stop recording
Here is how SoundEdit 16 used to record sound:
{opens a new blank sound document by default but you can also create one via File Menu ——> New}
Click red Record button to start recording.
Click it again to stop recording.
Add tracks if you wish, mix them down later.
Option to save or discard when done, like most software
OH, and nowhere in the tutorial or in my own copy did I find a place to compose music from a piano roll interface.
Gawd, how I loved that program.
I’m using a Macbook Air with Snow Leopard (USB Flash Drive). I wish it was possible to select a manual install and avoid unwanted content. There are plenty of Apps I don’t need and the space is very limited. Which Applications, related files and other content can be removed and how? Is there a list of all nonessential files?
Is dragging Photo Booth to the trash enough, for example?
I don’t ned iWeb and iPhoto and Garage Band either.
AHunter3, Let me alleviate your woes.
To record live audio of any sort: Just start a song file of ANY type. It doesn’t matter.
Go to TRACKS: Select new track. Choose real instrument.
The metronome is found in CONTROL as is count in function if you like that. Toggle it on or off by simply clicking on it.
Spacebar starts and stops the song. so if you were recording, you could click the red button to start and just pop the space bar to stop everything.
To use loops, just drag and drop them into the song field. They will automatically generate their own track.
A good function to use is musical typing. GB comes preloaded with a nice selection of well sampled instruments you can play on the regular computer keyboard. Edited a bit for reverb and such they sound great. (i don’t have a real keyboard and don’t know jack about midi) it is found in the WINDOW tab at the top. Also there you can find a standard keyboard, and the zoom button which blows up the program to fullscreen.
You can edit clips by double clicking on them and a dialog will open up.
In this area you can find an automatically generated notation by changing the piano roll thingy to real notes.
Going back to the OP …
Nowadays many (most?) PCs don’t come with nearly the pile of bloatware they used to. It’s not zero, but it’s not at all like the laundry list **runner pat **put up in post 15. And they generally uninstrall completely & correctly from the normal add/remove programs interface.
Spending 20 minutes cleaning out the stuff you don’t want isn’t an excessive burden for a purchase you’ll apparently be using for several years. I can guarantee that if you’ve never used a Mac you’ll spend a lot more time learning to use your new Mac well than you saved by not having to uninstall some marketing ware from your new PC.
Remember, each piece of advertising ware in there is another $5 off the price you paid for the box. That stuff isn’t installed by the manufacturer for the fun of it. They charge the software supplier for the privilege of getting their product under your nose. At least some of that income is reflected in a reduced retail price to you.
My problem is that it usually takes longer than 20 minutes for most people to remove all the bloatware. I know some systems that the only easy way was to completely reformat, and that involves downloading all the drivers from their website on a flash drive and finding an OEM version of the OS, as Og forbid they actually supply one.
And I always think people overestimate how hard it is to use a Mac. I’ve used PCs all my life, but I acclimated to a Mac pretty quickly when I got to use one in a school lab. (Not for anything special, it’s just that there was always at least one mac free, so I knew I wouldn’t be taking someone’s homework time.)
