Applying the effect is incorporated into the overall mixing and encoding process in GarageBand, streamlining the whole process and actually making me much more likely to use SoundSoap. It now appears as an effect option on the menu in GarageBand, allowing me to incorporate it into a GarageBand project without having to edit it externally. With GarageBand, I was easily able to add SoundSoap as a plug-in. ![]() On the PC, I would have to edit, apply, and save each individual track I was trying to edit before importing it into Audacity–a time-consuming and tedious process. For example, I regularly edit interviews with SoundSoap to remove background noise and other interference. Good plug-in incorporation – Plug-ins are also easily configured in GarageBand. Even minor features like dragging and dropping various tracks, labeling tracks, and assigning specific graphics to different tracks are a breeze in GarageBand.īetter track details – The track effects and details in GarageBand 3, while not as extensive as programs like Logic or SoundForge, are more than adequate for most podcasters, and the graphical layout makes it very easy to add or alter effects and also makes it clear what is being applied to a particular track. The interface is set up very intuitively, with the most common podcasting tasks easily executed. I made the move to GarageBand for my podcasts almost immediately after getting my new Mac, and though I had a couple of bumps in the road (I was very set in my ways after using Audacity for so long), I’ve come to really love it as a podcasting platform. Why wouldn’t anyone use it for a podcast? Pros of GarageBandįigure 2: GarageBand 3 (included with iLife ’08 for the Mac) GarageBand is, after all, built for podcasting. I longed for a Mac and this product as I started my podcast in 2007. I’ve used GaregeBand on other people’s computers for quite some time, and I was always impressed with the ease of use and sleekness of the experience. What gives? Who knows…but it’s very irritating. It almost always crashes on me on the Mac, even after repairing permissions and doing other troubleshooting. It is extremely buggy and crash-prone on the Mac. As soon as I installed Audacity on my Mac, however, I understood all the carping about the product. My Mac-using friends have long complained about Audacity’s constant crashing, which I always found peculiar-this program almost never crashed for me and was almost always extremely stable. Though I also have a copy of Sony SoundForge for the PC and use it for more complicated single-track editing projects, Audacity is perfectly adequate for mixing together the 5-20 individual tracks that I use for each podcast into a cohesive whole. ![]() Audacity versus Garagebandįigure 1: Audacity (open source software for PC, Mac, or Linux)įor the first 70+ episodes of Contrabass Conversations, I did nearly all of my mixing and editing in Audacity, a great piece of open-source software that is popular among many podcasters. Even though I’m basically doing the same tasks for blogging and podcasting on my new Mac set-up as I was doing on my old Windows set-up, the more seamless integration of programs and user-friendliness of the major applications has sped up my process considerably, leaving me more time to actually create content rather than futz with settings and file transfers. This experience is strikingly similar to what I outlined for my blog workflow transition in part 2 of this series. Much more efficient podcasting on the MacĪfter a few weeks spent adjusting to this new operating system and the new applications available to me, I’v discovered that I can massively cut down on the number of small but annoying tasks that always plagued my Windows podcasting workflow. encoding the podcast into a distribution format (MP3, MP4, etc.).There are a whole lot of small tasks that go into podcast creation and production, and one’s efficiency in handling all these tasks plays a major role in determining whether a podcast will take two hours to put together or twenty hours! Check out part 1 and part 2 of this series as well!Ī significant chunk of my time these days is spent preparing, recording, editing, distributing, and promoting my podcast Contrabass Conversations, and even though I have always known that I’d have an easier time doing these tasks on a Mac, I’m a creature of habit, and I didn’t relish the thought of relearning all these tasks on a new operating system.
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