Inside Apple's iLife '08

IWeb may not have received a massive makeover, but Apple did respond to the most prevalent complaints about the program's original release. The ability to add HTML code to iWeb pages, combined with its existing ease of use, makes iWeb '08 one of the best consumer-oriented Web design tools available. And the fact that users can now take advantage of the special .Mac effects using a custom domain name adds value to both iWeb and .Mac.

iDVD

Given the improvements and new features in the other iLife applications, iDVD's update looks almost boring at first. Although there is no massive shift in interface or functionality, Apple has included a number of new themes and a number of new buttons. The number and style of buttons in the previous version was limited and largely unchanged from early iDVD releases. This new version offers a wider range of styles, shapes and other options for DVD buttons. While not as exciting as iMovie's new interface or iWeb's ability to add Web widgets, this is a welcome addition to iLife.

IDVD offers a selection of new themes and buttons. (Click for larger view.)

GarageBand

GarageBand has always been a great tool for anyone interested in making music (or podcasts). It provides novice and experienced musical talents with recording, editing and mixing tools for both live instruments and recordings and for attached MIDI devices and virtual software instruments. GarageBand in iLife '08 offers some very cool new features, and the one with broadest appeal is aimed at those Mac owners who have limited or even no musical or audio know-how.

Magic GarageBand is a really fun tool for any music lover, even those who can't read a lick of music or play an instrument. It lets you pick a musical style and multiple instruments and create a virtual band that then crafts a unique song. You can listen to the song and tweak the selection of instruments from an Audition window that looks like a stage. When you hear something you like, you can then move it into the full GarageBand interface, where you can edit each track, record your own tracks, add sound effects or audio loops, and more.

Magic GarageBand makes a great tutorial for the program. (Click for larger view.)

Even if you're not entirely sure what you're doing, this can make for a great way to spend an afternoon -- both for the plain fun of it and as a way of discovering how to use GarageBand. In many ways, Magic GarageBand is the best tutorial for the application that I've ever seen, and it also makes for a great time.

For those with more musical experience, GarageBand also benefits from some other nice new features. One of them, useful for songwriters, is the Arrangement track. This track displays above the real and software instrument tracks and allows you to group sections of music such as verses, chorus, introductions, instrumental solos, etc. The Arrangement track is a great tool to easily identify sections of a song or project, and makes it much easier to locate, edit, copy and paste specific segments within a recording. It is, without a doubt, a feature that users may wonder how they lived without.

Inside Apple's iLife '08 iMovie iPhoto iWeb iDVD GarageBand

Another cool new feature is multi-take recording. When recording additional tracks to a composition, you can now select a section of the existing project and click Record. When you're done, just click Record again for another take (repeat the process as many times as you like). GarageBand stores each take and lets you hear how it sounds, and eventually you can select which take you want to use. This isn't really a new capability -- you could do it before using multiple tracks for each take -- but this feature makes the process a whole lot easier to manage.

It's great for a project where you are recording and mixing multiple tracks, because you can easily listen to various combinations to find the one that sounds best. That GarageBand saves all your takes, even after you've selected one, is icing on the cake, because you can later go back and experiment with alternative mixes or see how other takes sound with new additions to a song. This feature, as you can guess, requires a large amount of disk space when you're recording a large number of takes.

Automated track effects and a visual equalizer that makes adjusting the sound of tracks a breeze (and includes a number of presets for those not used to working directly with an equalizer) round out the major new additions to GarageBand. The automation of effects allows you to essentially graph where you want an effect to increase or decrease throughout a track, making it easy to modulate effects like echo or reverb. This provides a really simple but powerful way of dynamically adjusting the sound of tracks in a way that has seldom (if ever) been available to consumers working with digital audio.

Without a doubt, this is the best version of GarageBand Apple has ever produced. It opens the world of music creation to anyone with a Mac. For experienced musicians, however, it also enables easier editing and complex sound modifications. All in all, it's a great product that offers users a fun time as well as excellent sound.

Ryan Faas is a freelance writer and technology consultant specializing in Mac OS X and cross-platform network solutions.