Apple announces GarageBand 2 --- Link

[Johnny B]

Hmmm, lots of new features...

http://www.apple.com/ilife/garageband/

[Johnny B]

Lemme see if this paste thing works:

Adjust timing and pitch for better quality recordings.

Multi-track recording handles up to eight tracks at a time.



You can lock tracks to prevent accidental changes.

GarageBand can display music notation in real time.


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GarageBand lets you easily perform, record and create your own music. Whether you’re an experienced or aspiring musician. Or just want to feel — and sound — like a rock star. With the new version of GarageBand, you can even record multiple tracks at the same time. Sing as you play the guitar, harmonize with your best singing bud or jam with the band, and GarageBand will record every note. And when all your tracks are in place, you can view them in full music notation and take advantage of new GarageBand features to enhance the tuning and timing of your recordings.


Multi-track Recording


Thanks to its new multi-track recording capabilities, GarageBand now lets you record your own vocals as you tickle the ivories or strum the guitar. You can sing a duet, or you can invite the band over to back you. GarageBand works with any I/O hardware device compatible with Mac OS X and can record up to eight simultaneous audio tracks — eight Real Instruments and an additional Software Instrument track.


Display Musical Notation


Wish you could view full musical notation as you record? Now you can. Whether you’re recording software instruments or recording your own live performance, GarageBand can now generate music notation in real time, displaying it on the fly.


There’s more. You can now choose how you’d like to edit software instrument recordings. You can use the “piano roll” view you’re used to using. Or you might want to try something new. GarageBand 2 lets you edit your recorded music — adjust, replace or move notes — using the new music notation view.


Record Smart


If you’d like your recordings to sound more professional, take advantage of some of the new recording capabilities GarageBand 2 offers. Guitarists and bassists, for example, will really enjoy the new Instrument Tuner — it lets them tune their instruments before they play.


Was the lead vocalist flat or out of tune? GarageBand 2 can fix out-of-tune notes in both vocal and real-instrument recordings. And the enhanced timing options available in GarageBand 2 let you easily tighten up the rhythm of guitar, bass, vocal and other real instruments you record. What’s more, the audio you record now follows project tempo and key, so you can speed them up or slow them down — just like Apple Loops.


Work with More Instruments, Loops


The release of Jam Pack 4: Symphony Orchestra means that you have four Jam Pack packages from which to choose. Each one offers more than 2,000 Apple Loops and dozens of playable software instruments and comes packed with talent: hundreds of professional backup musicians and sound engineers ready to enhance the sound and quality of your compositions. Symphony Orchestra alone places more than 30 of the most important orchestral instruments at your disposal. Professional quality software instruments, they can help you create realistic symphonic music and movie soundtracks, or add the power of a symphony to pop, rock and hip-hop songs.





Explore GarageBandRecord your next big hit.

PlayAn all-Mac jam session.

LoopsNow create your own.

RecordMulti-track recording.

MixControlling the music.

Jam PacksMore "band" for GarageBand.

AccessoriesAdd I/O to your studio.





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iLife Up-to-Date


Qualified customers can purchase iLife ’05 through our Up-to-Date program.




Create and Save Your Own Loops


Now, when you’re finished recording a performance on a real or software instrument, you can turn your recording into a loop. The loops you save join the Apple Loops already in your loops library, where you can browse through them, search for them and use them in subsequent compositions. And since they’re yours, you can also share them with other musicians.




More Expansion Opportunities


GarageBand 2 can now import MIDI files, the industry standard file format for music songs. That means you can more easily import music from other applications or download music files from the Internet for use in your own songs.


And what about Acid loop files? GarageBand 2 supports those as well, providing even more potential sounds to use in your next musical opus.




Tighter integration with iLife ’05


Use your GarageBand compositions for iPhoto Slideshows, iMovie Soundtracks, iDVD menus and Keynote 2 presentations. Simply export to iTunes.




Seamless Integration with iWork ’05


Heard about iWork ’05? The perfect way to get your hard work done quickly and easily, iWork ’05 consists of Pages (for creating absolutely impressive printed documents) and Keynote 2 (for spectacular presentations). Using the built-in iLife Media Browser, Keynote 2 offers a perfect opportunity to use one of your GarageBand compositions to accompany a slideshow, self-running kiosk or live presentation. Simply export the music you create in GarageBand to iTunes, and import the tracks you’d like to use via the built-in Browser.

[Johnny B]

Hmmm, did not get the screen shots, I must be doing the cut and paste thing wrong...Oh well, I tried...

[uosdwis]

Hopefully it's better optimized than version 1. That was one of the slowest apps I've ever used. Performance on a 1GHz G4 iBook was nowhere near decent. I like the concept, though, and would like it to be a little leaner to be more useful as a scratchpad on the road. The software instruments are great.

[Vermeer]

I'm a little depressed to see that 75$ GarageBand software has music notation and ProTool still has nothing like that

To be fair, Protool has a few thing GarageBand does not have...

[Johnny B]

Some of the rumor sites are getting hit with legal injunctions to make them stop disclosing Apple's trade secrets for new products...plus Apple wants to know who the leakers are...

But it looks like Apple has some kind of new break-out box in the works code named "Asteroid"... for around 129 USA dollars you get a firewire interface, a couple of XLRs and a TRS or 2, some RCAs and I guess a headphone jack...maybe more...and I think you can gang them together or so the Apple rumor mills say...
I wonder if it will have the new DICE 2 firewire chip that is supposed to be so hot or what kind of A-to-D and D-to-A chip sets they will have?

I guess we will soon see.....

[max cooper]

I've heard people say that Garage Band is pretty cool, but when I got my G5 out of the box, I opened it and laffed and laffed and laffed.

Maybe it can do some cool stuff and I didn't check it out thoroughly enuff.

But Auto-Tune for the masses???

[Johnny B]

Hmmm, ok...here's where they are going according to Apple's Developer website...

"Tiger Articles

"Mac OS X v.10.4 Tiger Overview: New features, APIs, and frameworks.

"Working with Spotlight: Powerful search technologies available to developers.

Developing Dashboard Widgets: Powerful mini-applications that are quick and easy to develop.

Developing 64-bit Applications: Mac OS X Tiger breaks the limitations of 32-bit computing.

Working with Automator: Extend the value of your application with Automator Actions and Workflows.

Mac OS X Tiger breaks the limitations of 32-bit computing and allows developers to create command-line applications, servers, and computation engines that can work with mind-blowing amounts of memory. Previous versions of Mac OS X have been able to take advantage of more than 4GB of system memory when running on a G5-equipped Mac, but each application was still subject to the 4GB limit imposed by a 32-bit address space. Tiger obliterates that restriction and allows applications to access a 64-bit address space when running on the PowerPC G5. Better yet, this support comes with no compromise in the ability to run current 32-bit applications.

This is no small feat. Others are trying to bring 64-bit computing to the desktop but have met with limited success. Apple is doing so in a manner that maintains 32-bit compatibility at full speed while providing the headroom to meet application requirements for the next 20 years—even if application memory requirements double each and every year. As well, only Mac OS X will support both 32-bit and 64-bit hardware with a single version of the operating system. From G3 to G5, from iBook to Xserve, there is just one kernel and set of core system libraries for Tiger.

Furthermore, the transition of the Mac to 64-bit computing has been, and will continue to be, a smooth one. This is, in large part, because the PowerPC architecture was defined as a 64-bit architecture with a 32-bit subset from day one. This means that a 64-bit migration strategy has been part of the platform since the PowerPC was first introduced. It is also the reason why 32-bit applications don't have to run in a special compatibility mode as is required on other 64-bit architectures. No penalties. No compromises. In fact, thanks to overall system improvements and fine-tuning, many 32-bit applications will run more efficiently than before.

This article shows you what 64-bit computing means for you, how 64-bit support has been built into Tiger, and how you can build 64-bit applications. First, let's start with what 64-bit computing can deliver.

What 64-bit Computing Gets You

By definition, the difference between 32-bit computing, the gold standard for the last 20 years of desktop computing, and 64-bit computing is the size of the memory space an application can use. In a 32-bit world, an application can address 4GB of memory. For many of the applications that we use everyday, such as word processors and spreadsheets, this is more than enough memory. However, if you work with large datasets, such as the human genome or geospatial data, 4GB suddenly becomes very limiting.

64-bit computing shatters the 4GB limit giving a virtual address space in excess of 16 exabytes. That's 16 billion billion bytes. You can't even begin to put that much RAM in a Power Mac—yet—but Tiger sets the stage for some truly incredible system capabilities.

64-bits in Real Terms

The idea of a 4 terabytes of physical memory, much less 16 exabytes of address space, is a bit mind-blowing. To help you wrap your head around the scale of data that we are talking about, consider the following:

A DVD can hold 4.7GB of data storing over 2 hours of high quality MPEG-2 video.

250 DVDs can contain about a terabyte of data.

4 250GB hard drives, the largest currently available in the Power Mac G5, will also store a terabyte of data.

A fully loaded Xserve RAID can currently hold 5.6 terabytes of data.

The largest physical library in the world, the U.S. Library of Congress, contains about 20 terabytes of text.

The Internet Archive, dedicated to maintaining an archive of the Internet, holds over a petabyte (1000 terabytes) of data and is growing at over 20 terabytes a month. It would take 175 Xserve RAIDs, 4000 250GB hard drives, or 4.4 million DVDs to store that much data.

An exabyte can contain 1000 Internet Archives—at least right now.

No matter how you slice it, 16 exabytes is a lot of address space. There's a lot of headroom for the future and it will take a long time to exhaust the potential of the 64-bit address space.

Tiger's 64-bit Support

The focus of Tiger's 64-bit support is to enable C and C++ applications that are most likely to benefit immediately from a larger address space. These include scientific data processing applications, rendering engines, and high load servers. These applications have naturally large data sets. Typically, these applications are faceless—meaning that they don't have a GUI—and are executed from the command line.

To meet this focus, Tiger will ship with a 64-bit version of libsystem—the system library implementing most of the fundamental UNIX APIs. In addition, a 64-bit PowerPC ABI, based on the 32-bit ABI, will be introduced. 64-bit binaries will be contained in an updated Mach-O format that will run on G5 systems with Tiger or later.

It is important to note that in the Tiger release, the support for 64-bit programming does not extend throughout the entire set of APIs available on Mac OS X. Most notably, the Cocoa and Carbon GUI application frameworks are not ready for 64-bit programming. In practical terms, this means that the "heavy lifting" of an application that needs 64-bit support can be done by a background process which communicates with a front-end 32-bit GUI process via a variety of mechanisms including IPC and shared memory.

Fat Binaries

The updated Mach-O format in Tiger supports the concept of Fat Binaries. These allow both 32-bit and 64-bit executables to be shipped as part of the same file. This means that developers and network system administrators can distribute a single version of an application to all users regardless of whether their system contains a G3, G4, or G5 processor. When the application is executed, the system automatically selects the appropriate code for the system without user intervention. Using Fat Binaries greatly simplifies distribution, installation, and administration of applications.

I/O

64-bit applications can use posix read, write, and ioctl APIs to access storage devices and can use sockets for network I/O. However, they won't be able to use IOKitLib and IOUserClient plug-ins to access devices.

Benefits to 32-bit Applications

Tiger's support for 64-bit computing doesn't leave 32-bit applications out in the cold. 32-bit applications will be able to access most of the 64-bit based registers in the G5 as well as take advantage of the 64-bit based load/store units and logic units of the G5.

In addition, 32-bit applications can take full advantage of the G5's massively parallel execution core. This core sports two pipelined double-precision floating point units, support for more than 200 in-flight instructions, and more than three times the internal bandwidth of the G4. Even when running 32-bit applications, the G5 makes short work of the most complex tasks.

Creating 64-bit Applications

Creating a 64-bit application is fairly straightforward. For the most part, it's programming as usual. Xcode and the GCC compiler take care of most of the details. You do need to keep in mind the 64-bit data model as well as the limitations of the 64-bit support in the Mac OS X frameworks.

Enabling the 64-bit Compiler in Xcode

To build a 64-bit executable from within Xcode, all that you need to do is edit the executable's target and make the "Architectures" setting either ppc64 or ppc ppc64. The first of these will produce a 64-bit only binary. The second will produce a fat-binary containing the executable code for running on both 32-bit and 64-bit systems.

LP64 Data Model

The 64-bit data model used by Mac OS X is known as "LP64". This is the common data model used by other 64-bit UNIX systems from Sun and SGI as well as 64-bit Linux.

...

Conclusion

As you have seen, Mac OS X Tiger takes the next step in 64-bit computing with the ability to build certain types of applications, such as server applications, and background processes used by renderers and computational engines, as 64-bit applications. These lower-level tools can communicate with graphical front-end applications for presentation and other visually-oriented functions.

Mac OS X's transition to 64-bit computing is a long-term effort. The support in Tiger for 64-bit applications is just the second of many phases. The timing and specifics of additional support for 64-bit applications will be decided with feedback from the developer community.

How You Can Get Started

Tiger doesn't ship until sometime in the first half of 2005. But as a developer, you can get started working with pre-release builds of Tiger now, and be ready to release your application when Tiger ships. How? Take advantage of the Tiger Early Start Kit, which will give you everything you need to start your Tiger development today, including pre-release versions of Tiger and Xcode 2.0, and the Tiger ADC Reference Library.

For More Information

Optimizing for the Power Mac G5

Tuning for G5: A Practical Guide

Posted: 2004-12-20"

So that looks pretty cool, aye?

I'm sure Bill Gates and his Redmond crew know all this..and have their own things planned...

But Apple looks to be in a good position to satisfy many creative people's needs for the foreseeable future...

YMMV.

[2A Batterie]

FWIW, GarageBand has been very good to me. I've been a musician all of my life and have always been interested in music technology. Working with GB was the first time I had a music program readily available to me. Granted, it has its limits and is a major CPU hog, but it is a great tool. Being one part of a program (iLife) that costs only $49, it delivers great bang for the buck. It surely is not powerful enough for pro apps, but offers way more than a consumer needs. I ended up using GB to create accompanying tracks for a revue show, and it worked great. GB has made me about $5000 and led me to go to the next level of software and equipment.