Section 69. Music Recording and Editing

69. Music Recording and Editing

GarageBand (www.apple.com, included in the iLife suite) turns any Mac into a sound studio. Use built-in digital instruments, connect a MIDI keyboard, or plug in your mic and belt out a tune; GarageBand makes recording, enhancing, and editing audio tracks as simple as cutting and pasting text in a word processor. PCs have nothing quite like it.

Sound Studio (www.freeverse.com, $79.95, shown in Figure 28) is a multitrack editor so simple to use that my nephew was mixing custom MP3 ringtones within five minutes of launching the program.

Figure 28. Sound Studio packages precise, multitrack audio and music editing into a straightforward, easy-to-use interface.

Audicity (www.audicity.sourceforge.net, free) is a cross-platform, open-source editor popular with podcast producersmostly because of its price.