MacMegasite

As many of you know, Mac’s are designed for creative people. They even come with programs to make movies, photos, and music. Music on a Mac is so easy. It comes with Garage Band which next to Logic is the greatest application to create music loops and create music. Today we are going to talk about Garage Band on older Macs and methods to make it run smoother.

I recommend you have a G4 processor or at bare minimum a G3 over 700MHz to use Garage Band. If you are going to use software based instruments, its a good idea to lock the channels your not using when recording multiple software instruments, things will run much smoother. More RAM, a faster processor, and a sound card will benefit greatly.

Garage Band 3 is my favorite version of it so far.

When you start it up you have the option to create a new song, new podcast, or a new movie score. You have three main ways to add sound to Garage Band, the easiest is to add loops and that will suit a lot of people. Another more powerful way to make music is to use the software based instruments and possibly buy a USB musical keyboard (available online for under $20) to add functionality to this mode. The most professional option is to plug in your real instruments into the sound card. This is only possible if you buy a sound card for your Mac (sorry the on-board one just wont cut it).

So it’s great to make music but you really want to edit it, right? Well thats when Audacity comes in (http://audacity.sourceforge.net/). Audacity is a free, powerful audio editor.

So in Garage Band your going to want to save your song, then export it to iTunes. Once in iTunes you convert it to MP3 then you open it in Audacity, I’m not going to give a tutorial on using Audacity, but it makes it easy to do simple things like trim up the open and endings and such.

This weeks article was a bit late, but I really wanted a chance to play with these two applications more. I realize it isn’t real in depth
but thats not the point, I just wanted to talk about how well Garage Band runs on older Mac’s and how to edit your audio in a more powerful environment. Next week I’ll be talking about my machines, what I plan to upgrade, what upgrades will affect what aspect of the performance, and what models would benefit most from which upgrades.

All my old articles as well as other content by me can be found on my website at myeyes.dreamhosters.com

Today, as promised, I will be talking about web designing on older macs. Many web designers feel that they need the latest machines to run web design and image manipulation applications. I debunked the later last week by showing you seashore which is a more than capable web image solution. I personally know a bit of HTML and XHTML code but it’s really not practical to design websites by hand (please spare me the hate mail). If you really want to hand code I think you can find your way to the text editor or Textwrangler. But I’m focusing on WYSIWYG editors (or: What You See Is What You Get), the industry standard WYSIWYG editor is Dream Weaver. Unfortunately Dream Weaver is ridiculously expensive and very bloated. I’m going to examine a great open
source, free, and powerful editor called Kompozer.

I must confessed I’m no master at web designing but I know my way around Dream Weaver. Kompozer seems capable of the basic elements of designing web sites. I do miss the Flash integration and the built in image mapping tool, though. I’m building a social networking site at the moment it seems more than capable of designing complex web sites.

On to performance, Kompozer ran nicely on my Power Mac G4 Graphite (400mhz 512mb RAM). There was no noticeable slow down of any kind on my machine. Even intensive tasks like adding in videos and things were instant, there was never any slow down at rendering the page as well. Kompozer can be found at http://www.kompozer.net/ .
This week I also used the program iWeb, part of iLife 2006. iWeb works very well if you have a .Mac account; in fact, I strongly recommend using it for basic page design if you do, but if you do not it’s very difficult to post it on any other web server. I had issues when trying to place it on a server. I used FTP and uploaded all the files, the problem was some of the file names had characters that would not be recognized by other servers so I tried to rename the files and post them up but now parts of the files are missing (probably because I renamed their sources). All in all, it was serious pain to do without .Mac. Getting around that, iWeb is an incredible program that allows non-tech savvy people to create beautiful looking websites and simple blogs. iWeb isn’t very flexible so it shouldn’t be used for anything more than a basic personal page or web blog.

If you like the idea of iWeb but want more flexibility and an easier time to upload to servers, I suggest you look at RapidWeaver ( http://www.realmacsoftware.com/rapidweaver/).
The low end Mac user has many options to make websites and create images. Low end users have many alternatives, most of which discussed here are free! Just adding to my crusade, you can edit and create art, and make beautiful and powerful websites on a low end mac. If you have any questions about any thing we discussed here or any comments on my articles please feel free to email me at massivemediacreations@gmail.com. Next week I will be writing about editing audio and using Garage Band.

I recently acquired a Power Mac G4 and I’m very pleased with it. I can do the basics like surfing the ‘net, but I can also use the iLife suite at acceptable speed. So what am I getting at? I am a striving web designer and and trying my hand at the creative arts and I’m a full time student, if I can get all this done on a Power Mac G4 then I think a lot of people looking to buy a new computer would be very happy with an old mac.

Well enough of the Bio, lets get into the meat of the editorial, The deal is, I’m going to try to pump out articles as often as I can and the basis of them is, getting things done on older macs. This week I’m going to go over a decent Photo Shop alternative.

I have been playing with a free program called Seashore for the mac. It seems faster and more elegant than Gimp, while it retains it’s powerful features. Some actions tend be slow on my Power Mac G4 like applying gradients takes a few seconds. But Seashore provides basic image editing in a simple clean interface for the best price in the world. Next week I’m going talk about working with NVU in OS X.