What’s In A Name? Amadeus And Audio?

There are more than a handful of stops between one end of the spectrum (free) and the other (Emagic’s “Logic Pro” audio application.

Starting with “Free”, each Mac comes with iLife, that suite of applications for photos, music, DVDs (if you have a Mac with a SuperDrive), movies, and music creation. The music creation application is called GarageBand and it will do a great job creating audio, mixing sound music in multiple tracks, adding special effects, and much more.

Did I mention that GarageBand is free?

Audio, either voice, music tracks, or both, can be exported directly to iTunes, imported into iMovie, and used in iDVD or iPhoto.

It could not be much easier to create quality audio, music or voice or both, using just these basic applications from Apple.

At the other end of the scale, there are even more choices and more capabilities. Apple bought the premier computer audio company, Emagic, a few years ago. Their Logic audio application is used extensively to record and mix commercial music CDs, movie soundtracks, and much more.

It’s expensive. The whole Emagic suite for Mac OSX will push you near to a grand ($1,000), but you’ll be able to load Logic onto your Mac and instantly be competitive with the best sound production studios in the world. That assumes you know something about music and sound.

In between, Apple also has the Final Cut Pro suite of tools for video and audio production.

SoundTrack (as part of Final Cut Pro, or as a standalone audio production application) is like GarageBand on steriods. There’s not much you can’t do with SoundTrack.

Even Final Cut Pro contains a great audio mixer with sound effects.

What if you just want to create an MP3 from a CD, add a few effects, and send it to a friend via email (I recommend that you don’t send a full CD cut in AIFF format, as that could easily run 50-megabytes in size; not an easy download for a friend using dial up email; he or she won’t be your friend much longer.

So, what do you do?

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