Software for Music

Your Mac mini includes two audio applications for creating and playing music: GarageBand and iTunes.

GarageBand

GarageBand (Figure 9.23) is an "honorary" iApp for home musicians, providing small-studio composition and multitrack recording features as part of the iLife package. Apple also sells Jam Packs of playable musical instruments and loops that can be used with GarageBand. Some of these are available free to .Mac members as well.

Figure 9.23. GarageBand looks very much like a high-end recording studio package. (Courtesy Apple Computer)

I have played with GarageBand enough to prove I am not a musician, but my musician friends say it's a serious tool for beginners. I like watching it create musical notation on the fly.

iTunes

When the first MP3 players came on the market, I sort of wondered what the fuss was about. Sure, you could carry music with you, if you call carrying an hour or two of tunes actually "carrying music." Hope that bike ride won't be a very long one, or else you'd better like those tunes a whole lot.

And yes, you could download the music you'd stolen over the Internet onto an MP3 playerin only slightly less time than it would take to play it. Okay, I exaggerate, but moving music to an MP3 player via USB cable is pretty slow.

Then along came Apple's iPod. The iPodbasically a multigigabyte hard drive with an operating system, a little processor, a headphone jack, a cute little dial for navigating through your music, and a FireWire or USB 2 portis one of the coolest inventions I've seen.

Coupled with iTunes, the iPod can download a CD from a Mac or PC in about 10 seconds. With its large hard drive, you can literally carry thousands of songs in your pocket.

note

I have a couple of iPods, one of which carries just my collection of old-time radio programs (visit www.otrftpserver.com for inexpensive downloads). Because a 30-minute program translates into only a 6 MB file, I am able to carry more than a month's worth of programs on one iPod. MP3 files and downloads have given new life to wonderful radio showsThe Shadow, The Jack Benny Program, The Lone Ranger, Dragnet, Johnny Dollar, and others.

iTunes is also the product that "saved" Apple and brought many Windows users into Apple Stores. Thanks to the Windows version of iTunes, iPods work for Microsoft users, too. But many of these people still end up in an Apple Store to buy their iPod or accessorize it. For some, the ultimate accessory is a Macintosh computer, which brings us to the Mac mini and this book.

If your music collection is large enough, it makes sense to buy a Mac mini just to warehouse it. With AirPort Extreme and an AirPort Express Base Station, you even have the ability to wirelessly deliver music from iTunes (Mac or Windows) to speakers around your home or office.

Since iTunes playlists can be sharedagain between all computers on your network, Mac or WindowsI can be upstairs using a Mac laptop, open a playlist of music from the Mac mini downstairs, and listen to the music through the powered speakers of my Bose Wave Radio (Figure 9.24).

Figure 9.24. There is a lot going on here. I am viewing and playing a song from a music collection kept on another Mac. The music is being sent from a computer downstairs to speakers in a Bose Wave Radio in the bedroom that is connected to an AirPort Express Base Station. Yes, this is all wireless.

The iTunes software lets you store information about your music, including a personal rating and how often you play a particular song. A Smart Playlist feature uses this information to create collections of, say, your 50 highest-rated songs, or the tunes you listen to most often, or music by a specific composer or from a specific year.

Dragging and dropping songs is not the only way to create a playlist. Smart Playlists significantly automates the process, even down to noticing new music that's added or statistics that change after the playlist is created. And iTunes has hooks into the other members of the iLife suite, so, for example, you can use music from your iTunes library in an iPhoto slideshow.

iTunes also has a feature that automatically adjusts the volume on your entire music collection, preventing one song from playing dramatically louder or softer than the others.

Audible.com's collection of downloadable books and other spoken contentsuch as Public Radio programsis supported by iTunes and iPod as well. I used to carry books on my Pocket PC, but the iPod's much larger capacity means that I can both carry more books and download higher fidelity versions of the files.

The one thing I don't like about iTunes is that it's only an MP3 player for radio stations. That means iTunes will tune in to only Internet radio stations that broadcast an MP3 stream. Although streaming MP3 tends to be very high quality (high bandwidth, too), very few stations broadcast in that format.

tip

If you want to hear NPR on iTunes, click the Radio button in the Source window. In the Public section, look for the KCRW or WNYC feed in the radio stations list.

For that reason, I find the iTunes' Internet radio tuner to be essentially useless, although in the bigger scheme of things, it's not all that important. RealNetworks' RealOne media player will tune in to all the Internet radio I care to listen to.

If you buy a Mac mini and don't already have an iPod, you should dig a little deeper and get one. But until you do, there are many enjoyable hours to be had using iTunes alone to rip songs from your CD collection, manage them on your Mac, and then burn them onto CDs you can use in the car or on a portable player.

Or you can visit the third leg of the iPod trinity, the iTunes Music Store, to download music to your heart's content (and wallet's detriment) for only 99 cents a song (Figure 9.25). You can't give this music to your friends, but you can play it on multiple Macs or iPods. And you can also pick and choose the music on a song-by-song basis, meaning that you don't have to buy an entire album just to get one song you like.

Figure 9.25. Apple's iTune's music store provides an excellent way to build a music collection. The 99-cents-a-song fee may seem expensive until you remember all the whole albums you used to purchase just to get one or two songs you actually wanted.

The combination of iPod, iTunes, and iTunes Music Store, for both Mac and Windows, is a stupendous achievement. The Mac mini enhances the trio further.

tip

There are many companies that make fine Macintosh accessories, many of them directed toward iPod, GarageBand, iChat, and digital photography users. Some of the best are made by Griffin Technology and Belkin Corp. Visit www.griffintechnology.com and www.belkin.com to see the latest.