Garage Band (Mac) audio conversion question

Factual Questions
1

I am trying to get some recordings of myself online for some applications (opera auditions).

I did the recordings in Garage Band on my wife’s Mac. The quality is fine as long as I am in Garage Band. However, as soon as I export to iTunes (NOT compress) some significant distortion is introduced at the loudest (i.e. highest (i.e. most important)) moments. It doesn’t seem to be a compression issue, as the problem still exists when the file is in AIFF format at 34mb. There is somewhat less distortion (but still enough to affect the quality) when I export it to disk as an m4a (1.9mb).

Anyone know anything about Garage Band that can help me with this?

2

Look here: http://www.macjams.com/forum/viewtopic.php?forum=1;showtopic=58695

3

Thanks, beowulff. They had exactly what I needed. My levels were indeed too high and it wasn’t coming across in Garage Band for reasons I don’t pretend to understand. But reducing the overall level fixed it.