Section 33.2. Set the Stage | iLife 05: The Missing Manual

33.2. Set the Stage

You can avoid many overburdened-Mac situations just by taking the time to set up your GarageBand environment smartly. For example:

Quit as many other programs as possible. GarageBand needs all the memory it can get.

Every PowerBook, iBook, and Power Mac G5 lets you switch your computer's brain into a slower, reduced-power mode to save heat and battery charge. But for GarageBand, that's just asking for trouble; it needs every hair of horsepower it can get.

Figure 33-1. Top: When GarageBand starts having trouble keeping up with everything going on in your tracks, the Playhead begins to change color . It turns from white, through orange, and finally to deepening red, as you approach the system-overload point. It's your early-warning system that your piece is approaching GarageBand BogDown.
Bottom: When GarageBand absolutely reaches the end of its ability to process all of the music, this message appears. Time to read this chapter.

So choose System Preferences, click Energy Saver, then click the Options tab. Now from the pop-up menu, choose Highest. Close the window.

Your laptop battery won't last quite as long, and your G5's fan might spin up a little more, but at least you'll be able to get some meaningful work done in GarageBand.

Don't try to play a song, loop, or audio file that's on a CD or DVD. Copy it to your hard drive first.
Turn off FileVault, if you're using it, by choosing System Preferences, clicking Security, and clicking Turn FileVault Off. (FileVault is a Mac OS X security feature that encrypts your entire Home folder; youd remember turning it on.) It slows down data transfer from your Home folder dramatically.

Alternatively, copy your GarageBand projects to a location outside your Home folderinto the Shared folder, for example. That way, you can leave FileVault turned on without any speed penalty.

33.2.1. Mute Some Tracks

If GarageBand announces that "Some parts were not played ," at least you should be the one determining which parts. As you work, you can mute the tracks whose playback you consider expendable for the moment. (Click each track and press the letter M key, or click the little speaker icon in the track header.)

Any track that you silence like this is one more task crossed off the Mac's real-time To Do list. By selectively muting and unmuting tracks, you should be able to get your piece mostly ready. Afterwards, you can either export the thing, convert some Software Instrument tracks to Real Instruments, or even bounce the whole thing into iTunes and back. Both of these radical tactics are described later in this chapter.

33.2.2. Lock Some Tracks

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 28 (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 speakersall in real time.

When you lock a track as shown in Figure 33-2, 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 33-2. Fortunately, it's a simple matter to unlock the track to make your changes, and then lock it again afterward, if you like.
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.

Figure 33-2. 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.

33.2.3. Temporarily Squelch the Effects

Here's another approach to relieving the Mac's speed burden : Turn off some effects. (Double-click a track to open the Track Info dialog box, expand the Details panel, and start turning off checkboxes.) You can always turn them on again before you export the finished piece to iTunes. This trick changes the sound, of course, but may be much quicker than locking tracks.

Tip: Amp Simulation is among the most processor- intensive effects of all. If you're a guitarist and you ache for the flexibility of having different guitar effects, but your Mac doesn't have the muscle for GarageBand's simulators, consider buying an inexpensive multi-effects box from a company like Digitech or Korg (under $100). These boxes apply the effects before the sound reaches GarageBand, so you can leave the Amp Simulations turned off.

It's worth considering, too, whether you'll actually hear individual track effects. Once you've added master effects like reverb, not all individual track effects are even audible.

33.2.4. Combine Tracks

Playing more tracks makes GarageBand work harder. In many cases, though, you can combine the material from several tracks into a single one.

It's especially easy to combine blue Real Instrument tracks. Figure 33-3 shows the procedure.

Combining green Software Instrument tracks is more difficult, because dragging a region into a different track usually means that its instrument sound changes. Not to worry: You can always turn Software Instrument regions into Real Instrument regions, as described on Section 24.3.2, and then merge them.

33.2.5. Enlarge Your Buffer

In GarageBand Preferences, click the Audio/MIDI button to see the controls shown at top in Figure 33-4. Setting it to "Maximum number of simultaneous tracks devotes more of the Mac's energies to playing back your piece.

The disadvantage of this setting is that when you record from a MIDI keyboard, you may experience latency a frustrating, fraction-of-a-second delay between each keypress and the playing of its sound.

The trick, then, is knowing when to switch this setting. Leave it on "Minimum delay when playing instruments live" when you're recording, and compensate by turning off some tracks if the Mac begins gasping. After the recording, change the setting to "Maximum."

Figure 33-3. Top: These three Real Instrument tracks are making this old Power Mac's heart race. There's no good reason for them to occupy different tracks, since their regions aren't playing simultaneously .
Bottom: By dragging all of their regions into a single track, you ease your Mac's burden considerably. The only downside is that you've lost the ability to specify different effect settings for each track.
A reminder: Use this trick only on regions that don't overlap.

33.2.6. Lose Some Software Instrument Voices

Some instruments, like flutes and kazoos, can play only one note at a timein software parlance, one voice at a time. A piano, meanwhile, can theoretically play 88 notes at once, although you'd need a few friends to help you press the keys if you wanted to hear more than 10 notes simultaneously.

But the more Software Instrument voices GarageBand must play, the more your Mac sweats. As shown in Figure 33-4 at bottom, a certain pop-up menu in the GarageBand Preferences dialog box lets you limit the number of voices that get played. In a pinch , you can set a limit on these voices, thus saving GarageBand further effort and sometimes making an unplayable song playable again on your Mac.

Figure 33-4. Top: Two settings in GarageBand's Preferences exist exclusively for helping you manage the Mac's processing burden. On this tab, the "Maximum number of simultaneous tracks" option is designed for stutter-free playback, although it's less helpful for recording live.
Bottom: You can also assist by limiting the number of simultaneous notes (voices) each instrument plays.

The wording of this dialog box is a tad cryptic, in that it refers to "sampled" and "other" voices. To comprehend this lingo, it helps to understand the two different ways that GarageBand can create Software Instrument sounds:

With samples . A sampled instrument sound began life as a recording of a real-world instrument playing one note in a real-world studio. Pressing a key on a MIDI keyboard triggers a playback of that short recording. In the case of woodwind instruments, the sampled sound seamlessly repeats for as long as you press the key.

In GarageBand, all the woodwind, brass, piano, guitar, bass, strings, and drum sounds are sampled sounds.
With synthesis . The rest of the Software Instrument sounds are created using software algorithms; in essence your Mac becomes a musical synthesizer. GarageBand's clavinet, organ, electric piano, and synthesizer Software Instrument sounds are all created this way.

Synthesized sounds put a greater strain on your Mac than sampled sounds, since GarageBand must compute these sounds on the fly.

When you inspect the dialog box in Figure 33-4, the options in the lower pop-up menu should make more sense. Suppose, for example, that you choose "10 sampled, 5 other." You've just specified that no Software Instrument will be allowed to play more than five notes simultaneously if it's an electronic keyboard sound (organ, electric piano, and so on), or more than 10 notes at once for any other Software Instrument.

Now, you might be aghast at this suggestion. Surely eliminating notes from your chords would eviscerate your harmonies, leaving them sounding hollow and empty.

In truth, though, you might never miss the notes that GarageBand leaves out of a busy orchestration. Meanwhile, thinning out the voices could make all the difference in a GarageBand composition that's too complex for your Mac.

Tip: Speaking of voices: When keyboard players attempt to create guitar parts by playing a MIDI keyboard, they often forget that a guitar has only six strings. If you play freely with both hands on the keyboard, using all 10 fingers, you may inadvertently create a guitar part that would be unplayable on an actual guitar.

33.2.7. Reduce the Track Overhead

Every time you create a new GarageBand project file, the program allots some memory to hold a certain number of tracks. (The exact number depends on the speed of your Mac and how much memory is installed.)

But if you intend to create nothing but a single-line kazoo recording, that's a lot of memory being set aside that could be used for other purposeslike keeping up with playback.

That's why, as soon as you know how many total tracks your piece will have, you should choose GarageBand Preferences, click the Advanced tab, and change the Maximum Number of Tracks pop-up menus (Figure 33-4, bottom).

You're telling the program: "I intend to use no more than eight Software Instrument tracks and eight Real Instrument tracks" (or whatever), "so please put whatever additional memory you were holding back into the pot. I could use it right about now."

33.2.8. Convert Software Instrument Loops

As you may have read in Chapter 23, Software Instruments are much more trouble for the Mac to play back than Real Instruments.

Now, at first glance, that statement might seem to be illogicalin fact, reversed . After all, green Software Instrument regions contain very little dataonly a list of note triggers ("Play middle C for one beat, then C sharp for two"). MIDI files take up only a few kilobytes on the hard drive. They're absolutely minuscule compared with digital recordings like Real Instrument regions, which take up 10 MB per minute. So why isn't it easier for the Mac to play the little files than the big ones?

Because it must also generate the instrument sounds , not to mention processing them with effects, as it plays each MIDI note. It's not the triggering that's so much work; it's the synthesizing.

To play a blue or purple Real Instrument region, on the other hand, the Mac just plays back a bunch of sound data that's already fully formed on the hard drive.

In any case, exploiting this little quirk of Software and Real Instruments is an excellent way to reduce the load on your Mac's processor, because GarageBand makes it easy to convert the former into the latter.

For example, GarageBand offers at least three ways to convert green loops into blue ones that are easier for the Mac to play:

If you press the Option key before dragging a green loop out of the Loop browser and into an empty spot on the timeline (and keep the key down), GarageBand creates a blue Real Instrument track. It then converts your loop into the familiar blue sound waves found in a Real Instrument region.
If you enjoy that auto-conversion so much that you'd always like GarageBand to convert green loops, choose GarageBand Preferences, click the Advanced tab, and turn on "Convert to Real Instruments." From now on, every loop you drag out of the Loop browser (into a blank spot in the timeline area) creates a blue Real Instrument track and region.

not convert it to a blue one.
You can drag a green loop that's already in a track into a blue Real Instrument track. GarageBand converts it to a Real Instrument region as described on Section 24.3.2.

Remember, though, that once converted to digital-audio form, a loop loses much of the editing flexibility it once had. You can no longer change individual notes inside it, for example.

33.2.9. "Bounce Down" Many Tracks into One

And now, one of the most useful and powerful tools in the GarageBand musician's arsenal. It involves exporting several tracks, or even all of your tracks, and boiling them all down into one.

Suppose, for example, that your Mac can play only five tracks at once before bogging down. However, you've got 20 tracks'worth of music in your head! Using the "bounce down" trick, that's no problem. You could simply proceed as shown in Figure 33-5.

Here's the step-by-step version:

Export all five tracks to iTunes (Figure 33-5, top). Reimport the result into GarageBand as one track (Figure 33-5, middle and bottom). Delete the original five component tracks, or just mute them. Now you're free to add another four! (Effective total now: nine tracks.)
Export these five tracks (which sound like nine) to iTunes. Reimport into Garage-Band as one track, delete the original fiveand add yet another four. (Effective total: 13.)

The one big caution here is that each time you export your tracks, you're freezing them. You're giving up any ability to adjust their effects, rebalance their volume levels, change the song's tempo, and so on. Take care to finalize each semi-mix as much as possible before exporting.

Tip: You might also want to use the File

Save As command along the way, preserving each set of exported tracks before you delete them, so you can return to the original GarageBand files if necessary. (Like when you finally get that dual-processor Power Mac G5 with 1 gig of RAM.)

With more RAM, GarageBand can hold more of the sampled audio (blue Real loops, your purple Real recordings, and green, sampled Software Instruments) in memory, and therefore doesn't have to read as much information from your hard drive, which is what slows GarageBand down.

In particular, if your Mac has only 256 or even 512 megabytes of memory, you're living at the edge, as far as GarageBand is concerned . (To find out how much you have, choose About This Mac.) Hie thee to www.ramseeker.com, choose your Macs model name from the pop-up menu, and see just how inexpensive a memory upgrade can be these days.

Figure 33-5. Top: A bunch of tracks, just crackling with music. Finalized and polished to within an inch of their life. And pushing the Mac to its max. How will you gain the headroom necessary to add the four vocal tracks you have in mind?
Easyjust export the half-finished mix to iTunes, and then delete the tracks from GarageBand.
Bottom: Then bring it all right back in as a single track, as shown here. Now you've got a nearly empty track canvas in which to add four more tracks.
You've just created what studio musicians call a submix.