Yesterday, New York Times Circuits columnist David Pogue reviewed Garage Band, part of the iLife ’04 suite of media creation tools from Apple Computer. This is an excellent review, explaining the key features of the product and giving some indication of how they can be used by someone who does not have a lot of musical background:
It’s designed to let people with even the feeblest musical talent, or even musical interest, create professional-sounding digital recordings. It puts at least as much power into amateur hands as its i-predecessors; all it lacks is the traditional first initial….
You can transpose {1,100 included musical loops}, making them play higher or lower, and even change their tempo. (Indeed, that’s one of GarageBand’s most impressive bits of magic; how can software make a digital recording play in a different key, or at a different tempo, without distorting it?) Still, that’s not quite the same thing as complete freedom to choose chords or melodies. In terms of compositional choices, nonmusicians are pretty much limited to fooling around with when various instruments play, not what.
This is the kind of review that a product like Garage Band needs in order to catch the attention of people who might be intrigued enough by it to choose to buy a Macintosh to use it. I imagine that a relatively small number of customers will run out and buy a Macintosh just to run Garage Band. But, if someone is looking to replace a home computer, they might be persuaded by Garage Band and other unique pieces of the iLife ’04 suite to choose a Mac and figure out how to migrate their documents.
If Apple can recapture a little of the Switch Campaign momentum with the new iLife suite, I’m sure they will be happy.