Garageband possesed?

[wsimpson]

Hi all,

I was doing some stuff in Garageband last night on my old school, G4 mac mini and the program started freaking out. The biggest problem was that tracks would appear and disappear for no apparent reason and the actual recordings on each track would flip around. For example, I would click on a guitar track to tweak the settings and then all the sudden two more tracks would appear out of nowhere and the drums parts would appear in the track labeled "guitar" and the guitar parts would show up in the track labeled "drums."

I'm almost certain this was caused by my recent upgrade to Leopard, since another one of my music apps, Guitar Pro, refused to even start after the upgrade. Thankfully, after uninstalling and reinstalling Guitar Pro everything seems to be okay. So I guess my question is, is there any hope short of uninstalling and reinstalling that anyone knows of? I doubt it, but I'm still a Mac n00b, so I figured I should ask.

FYI, this is the version of Garageband that came with iLife '05, so I'm guessing it's Garageband 2.

[dcv]

Hmm, you're apparently not alone in having problems with GarageBand and Leopard - http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=6409397

You can certainly give uninstalling and reinstalling a try, but if other people are having issues with GB2+Leopard, I don't know how effective it would be. To be honest, if you use GarageBand a lot, upgrading to the newest version is a good idea - you can get iLife '08 for around $70 with student discount, and you'd get the newest version of GarageBand (along with newer versions of iPhoto, iMovie, and iDVD). The newer versions of GB have an easier to use interface with all track parameters on the side instead of in a separate window, and GB4 has better arrangement tools, multi-take recording, the ability to automate tempo changes, and the ability to export directly to AIFF, MP3, or AAC without going through iTunes (which, really, should've been a feature from the beginning). If all you want to do is jam and don't really want to compose, they also have this "Magic GarageBand" feature where it basically builds a backing band for you, and all you select is a style and the instruments you want. IMHO as a heavy GarageBand user, iLife '08 was definitely worth the money to upgrade just for GarageBand 4 (but the new iMovie sucks).

[yvette]

Hey, I know this is pretty off topic, but I wanted to know if anybody knows if there's a problem with iTunes and vista? Every time that I connect my iPod and try to add music from my computer, it freezes and doesn't let me add anything. This also occurs when I try to add music to my iTunes library and convert it. Does anybody have a solution for this?

[dcv]

Does your iPod have this same problem when plugged into a different machine?

Are you running the latest version of iTunes (7.6)?

Is your install of Vista fully patched?

Have you tried uninstalling/reinstalling iTunes?

[wsimpson]

Thanks for posting back so quickly, Dane! Last night I formatted my hard drive, re-installed Leopard, re-installed Garageband, updated everything and....still had some issues. I didn't have time to mess with it too much, but I tried simply recording 2 guitar tracks and had a similar issue where the first guitar track became a "Grand Piano" when clicking on the other one. Note that hence far all of these problems have been with "Real Instrument" tracks, as I don't really mess with the software instruments all that much.

While the new features in Garageband 4 do look pretty sweet, I think I'll probably hold off since I've been considering getting a Macbook at some point anyway. Glad to hear that you like it, though!

[wsimpson]

In case anyone was curious, I tried recording essentially the same song (2 real guitar tracks, 1 track of drum loops) last weekend and was met with the same problems. So it looks like upgrading may be the only solution.