Section 33.4. Mixing and Publishing Glitches


33.4. Mixing and Publishing Glitches

There's nothing more annoying than something going wrong when your masterpiece is finished. Here's what to do.

33.4.1. Finished Song Is Too Quiet

If your GarageBand masterpiece arrives in iTunes playing far too softly relative to your other tunes, revisit Chapter 29 for tips on setting the master volume level before exporting.

But if the master volume slider is turned all the way up and the music is still too soft, you can also:

  • Add the Compression effect before exporting . (Double-click the track header, turn on Compressor, and then drag the slider to the right.) Doing so boosts the softest passages and flattens the loudest ones, so that the whole thing remains at a more consistent volume level.

  • Use the iTunes preamp after exporting . Once the song is in iTunes, you can also boost the volume there. Figure 33-9 has the details.

33.4.2. Tracks Panned to One Side Still Play in Both Speakers

Here's a tricky one. Suppose you've used the Pan knob (Section 29.1.3) to "place" a certain track's instrument all the way to the left side of the stereo field, or all the way to the right. Yet when you listen with headphones, you still hear the darned thing coming out of both speakers!

There are two possibilities:

  • Most of the time, the culprit is the Echo or Reverb effect that you've applied to that track. When you turn on these checkboxes for one track, you're actually telling GarageBand how much of the master track's Echo and Reverb to apply. You're not really applying a different echo or reverb to this individual track.

    What you're hearing, then, is the sound of your fully panned track reverberating through both speakers, courtesy of the master echo or reverb. And the solution is to turn off the track's individual echo or reverb effect. (Double-click its track header and turn off the corresponding checkboxes.)

  • Turning on the Compressor effect for the master track also makes all tracks play in both left and right channels. (In this case, though, turning off Compressor for an individual track makes no difference. What matters is the Compressor effect on the master track.)

See Chapter 28 for much more detail on these effects, including how to turn them on or off.

Figure 33-9. To open this graphic equalizer in iTunes, choose Window Equalizer, or press - 2, or click the tiny equalizer button in the lower-right corner of the iTunes window. Drag the Preamp slider upward to boost this song's playback level, being careful not to overdo it.


33.4.3. Tail End of the Song is Chopped Off in iTunes

If you've applied reverb or echo to your song (or individual tracks), you might be frustrated to discover that GarageBand ends its export with the last measure containing notes. It doesn't especially care that the reverb on those notes might want to ring over into the following, empty measures. The result is an alarmingly abrupt cutoff of the sound in the exported tune.

The solution is shown in Figure 33-10.

33.4.4. Exported Song Won't Appear in iTunes

If a dialog box or alert message is open in iTunes at the moment you export from GarageBand, the handoff won't be successful. Click OK to dismiss whatever's going on in iTunes, and then try exporting again.

Figure 33-10. When you export the whole song to iTunes, heavy reverb, echo, or other time-based effect may get chopped off when the music endsin this case, at the end of measure 29.
The solution: Turn on the Cycle button, identified here. Then drag the yellow cycle stripe all the way from measure 1 of the piece, well past the end of the notes (top). Include enough in your selection to give the effect time to die away.
You've just told GarageBand exactly how much you want exported, even if some of it is "silence."


TROUBLESHOOTING MOMENT
Sound, but in the Wrong Account

Help! My brother and I both use GarageBand. I've switched into my account using Fast User Switchingand now when I play my MIDI keyboard, the sounds are coming out in his copy of GarageBand, which is still running in his account!

Pretty cool, though, isn't it? You both are logged in at once, and you're both running GarageBandbut anything you play is being intercepted by his copy!

Gotta love being alive to see this kind of thing.

Anyway, GarageBand works fine with Fast User Switching (a feature of Mac OS X 10.3 and later)but only one person at a time can use a MIDI interface. You have no alternative but to switch into your brother's account and quit GarageBand.

Now your account has the MIDI instrument's full attention.





iLife 05. The Missing Manual
iLife 05: The Missing Manual
ISBN: 0596100361
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2005
Pages: 314
Authors: David Pogue

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