Share and Share iLife ‘06
- Article 52 of 53
- iCreate, March 2006
If you want to share your movies, music and photos with someone, iLife 06 is now the best way to do it.
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If you want to be a little racy and publish photo galleries, movies, podcasts or even one of those new-fangled blog things, don’t worry: iWeb has templates for all of them. Almost everything complicated has been removed from the basic interface, with only an Inspector palette full of options to really let you tinker, making this the easiest web design tool on the market for the price: RapidWeaver is close but still not as simple; Freeway is as simple, but is far more expensive.
By itself, iWeb would probably rank as an interesting piece of shareware, but that’s about it really. Since it’s effectively iWeb 1.0, expect it to be a bit something really special by the time iLife 08 comes out. Right now, it’s only a killer in combination with the rest of the iLife suite.
Let’s make beautiful music together
You could be forgiven for never having touched GarageBand since the day you got your Mac or you installed iLife. Unless you have the musical instinct, it’s a one-trick pony heading in a different direction from you. GarageBand 3, however, has branched out from being a simple musical composition program to a complete sound editing suite.
Podcasting has been all the rage over the last year, and many people are now creating and publishing their own podcasts. This is by no means easy. Even if you’re creating a simple MP3 that’s mostly talk, you still have to record speech, edit out mistakes, join tracks together, fade music in and out: basically, you have to be a radio DJ. If you want to produce an enhanced podcast, you need to be able to add bookmarks and a picture track. Then there’s actually publishing it.
Garageband’s new podcast engineering studio makes all that easy. Since it’s a sound editing suite already, you already have the ability to fade tracks in and out, cut and edit: that’s now the easy part, because GarageBand is very, very good at it. Now though, it will reduce sound volume automatically if there’s speech on an audio track: ‘ducking’ in the trade.
Getting speech in is easier as well since GarageBand can now import the speech of an iChat audio conference with a click of the record button. Each participant’s speech will end up as a separate track, making it easy to vary their volumes independently.
Of course, if you never touched GarageBand because of your lack of musical ability, all these new tools are nothing without some good tunes. GarageBand now comes with 100 groups of jingles of varying lengths so that you can add incidental music and backing tracks at the right moments.
When you’re done making your new podcast, you can also add pictures to the new GarageBand podcast artwork track. As with all the iLife applications, you can use the iLife media browser to use photos from your iPhoto library directly. Then, after you’re happy with the podcast, you can send it directly to an iWeb podcast page.
Not all the new things in GarageBand are related to podcasting. You can now import an iMovie project into GarageBand and score it, using all the musical tools available to you. But for the most part, podcasting is the be-all and end-all of GarageBand 3.0. If that’s what you’re looking to do, you really won’t find an easier tool than GarageBand. But if GarageBand is already your thing and podcasting ain’t got the swing, don’t worry too much if you decide to skip iLife 06.
I DVD therefore I am
You wouldn’t think there was much more Apple could add to iDVD, and to a certain extent, you’d be right. One of the highlighted features of iDVD 6 is the ability to use third-party DVD burners, which was also a highlighted feature of iDVD 5. Sometimes, Steve’s reality distortion field can be strong that we think our DVD burner didn’t work with iDVD 5. But it’s not that strong.
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