I recently tried to use GarageBand to create a podcast. What a terrible mess. GB has a huge amount of potential, but when it fails, it fails miserably and utterly. You have to do an insanely complicated dance to get anything close to what you want out of it.
I co-host a weekly live streaming internet radio show, Audiophobe. As we do the live broadcast, I record the audio from our microphones to 16-bit, 44.1khz mono AIFF files for later mixing. Music comes from an iTunes playlist, though we use djay on the air. I wanted to create enhanced podcasts with chapter stops and artwork, since I’d seen one before, and thought it was really nice. GarageBand seemed like the only reasonable application to do this with.
I figured that I could take the two AIFF files with the mic audio, drop them into tracks in GarageBand, drop in the music, edit any screw ups, add chapters and artwork, and export as AAC (Enhanced Podcast) and MP3.
Unfortunately, I encountered a litany of problems.
GarageBand cannot edit large audio files.
After I dropped in the mic audio and got them synced up, I started adding in the music. Due to small differences in timing, the mic audio ended up out-of-sync with the music around 20 minutes in. “No problem,” I thought, “I’ll just edit out some of the space in between breaks.” Nope. When you try to edit any part of the region past 0m33s, GarageBand deletes the region from the start of the selection to the end of the region.
The solution is not pretty. I have to slice up the mic audio in Audacity, import each section, and sync up each break. There are approximately six breaks per show; this is incredibly time-consuming.
GarageBand will not accept some files, for no reason I can surmise.
I tried to drop one of the songs we played into GB. It would not let me drop it into the timeline. I had to decode it to a WAV, which I could then add to the project. I got absolutely no indication as to why GarageBand would not add the original MP3.
GarageBand cannot accept artwork dragged from iTunes.
You heard me right. You cannot drag artwork from iTunes into GarageBand. When this happened, I thought, “maybe you can copy and paste.” No, you can’t. “Maybe,” I thought, ̦“if I drag the image to the desktop first, GarageBand will take it.” But, no, that doesn’t work either. Want to know the solution?
Ridiculous.
GarageBand cannot export a WAV of your project.
It can export an AAC file to disk, or export a file to iTunes in a couple formats, which is dependent on iTunes’ settings and other non-obvious factors, which I will discuss next.
GarageBand’s export settings differ based on the visibility of parts of it’s UI.
If you have the Podcast track visible, GarageBand will only export an AAC file, no matter what. If you hide it, you can wrangle a WAV out of it by doing this dance:
Ridiculous.
GarageBand cannot create enhanced podcasts.
Or maybe it can, but it sure can’t export them to any format other than it’s own internal one. Any exported AAC has no chapters or artwork.
After going through all the hassles above for the sole purpose of creating an enhanced podcast, to have GarageBand strip out all the chapters and artwork is beyond maddening. I’m livid with rage. GarageBand is the most useless heap of binary offal Apple has ever created. The only other option for doing this kind of authoring is Logic Express, which is $300.
GarageBand sucks.
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