10.3. Lock Some Tracks

 <  Day Day Up  >  

This new GarageBand 2 feature is designed precisely for the gasping-Mac scenario described on these pages. It can help out by taking a lot of the processing load off the Mac's shoulders.

Ordinarily, GarageBand spends a lot of its playback attention on two kinds of music:

  • Software Instruments . These regions (green) contain MIDI data, nothing more. The sounds triggered by this note information are something GarageBand has to synthesize in real time during playback, and that takes a lot of processing power

  • Real Instrument effects . Real instruments (digital-audio recordings) are generally much easier for GarageBand to play back, because it doesn't have to do any calculating or real-time sound production. There's an exception, though: the effects described in Chapter 7 (reverb, EQ, and so on). They represent the state of the art in software simulators, but it's still quite a feat for the Mac to pass the sound of your various tracks into these software modules, calculate the new, post- processed sound, and then send it back out your speakers ”all in real time.

When you lock a track as shown in Figure 10-2, you take a snapshot of it. You freeze it. GarageBand memorizes its playback sound and stashes it on the hard drive, in essence turning all of it into digital-audio files with no effects or sounds that must be calculated in real time. You should find that GarageBand is now capable of playing back complex arrangements that used to reduce it to a limp puddle.

You do pay a small price for this luxury, however:

  • Locking a track can take a long time.

  • Once the track is locked, you can't edit it. Sometimes, of course, that's a good thing; it means that you can freeze a track that's already perfect, protecting it from accidental modification. (In other words, some people's reason for locking tracks has nothing to do with reducing the processing load.)

    If you do attempt to make changes, though, you'll get only the error message shown in Figure 10-2. Fortunately, it's a simple matter to unlock the track to make your changes, and then lock it again afterward, if you like.

    Figure 10-2. To lock a track, click the tiny padlock icon in its track header, as shown here. It "lights up" to remind you that the track is locked. (If you forget, and you click inside the track as though to edit it, you see the dialog box shown here at bottom.)
    The next time you click Play, GarageBand locks the track before the song starts playing.


  • The amount of power you restore to GarageBand by locking tracks has to do with the speed of your hard drive, because that's where the tracks' playback now originates. On laptop drives, full drives, or older, slower hard drives , you may not get much of a boost out of track locking.

 <  Day Day Up  >  


GarageBand2. The Missing Manual
GarageBand2. The Missing Manual
ISBN: 596100353
EAN: N/A
Year: 2005
Pages: 153

flylib.com © 2008-2017.
If you may any questions please contact us: flylib@qtcs.net