I’ve been a long time fan of Adobe Audition since before Adobe purchased it and it was still known as Cool Edit Pro. I used version 1.5 to record J Roland Kelly, Stop Your Nursing Unless You’re Rendering Fun and version 2.0 to record J Roland Kelly Taunts the Process… into Attacking.
Both fu*king fantastic albums might I add.
But now that I have a MacBook Pro I’ve been playing around in GarageBand and it’s alright by me. Surprisingly good actually. Almost unbelievable that it’s free with a Mac.
It doesn’t have all the functionality of Audition, it can’t read and write to every format out there for example but really who needs that… really you just need two formats: one that is high quality for preservation, and one made for distribution.
If you are recording everything yourself, just stick with Apple’s authoritarian formats and you’re fine.
Adobe hasn’t released an edition of Audition for the Mac yet. That was a big part of why I finally started playing around with GarageBand.
The experiment did not come without its problems. The usb interface for the best microphone I have ever owned MXL USB .006) didn’t work with GarageBand. Bummer.
But at the time I was just interested in demo-ing some new songs anyway… and that’s when I discovered something great.
The built-in omni-directional mic in the Mac Book Pro is superb. It’s frequencies are limited a little to the high end, but it’s still quality, sweetheart. If you bought a mic this nice it would cost somewhere in the $70 dollar range.
Here’s an example of what can be done with just the built in mic and GarageBand set up. This is me playing my acoustic guitar in front of the MacBook Pro with one take. It’s a song from my second album.
The song is a little heavy on the “Japanese girls in black & white,” and “everything must die” themes but hey… it’s like what a famous war criminal once said “you go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have.”
-J Roland Kelly
