Well I sat down last night to try out Apple's Garageband as a recording platform. Now I did not directly record into it because I prefer recording to minidisk as a medium, but I bounced my MD audio in. First off, Garageband has a great interface and can get you up and running right away. Unfortunately my likes of the program stopped there. Perhaps the one thing that annoyed me the most was the export feature. You cannot export a song directly to wave, mp3 or any other format. You have to export the track to iTunes and then to mp3. Very round-a-bout and annoying. It seems as well that true to its name Garageband is geared for guitar players. There are a gazillion preset effects chains designed for vocalists and guitar players. Cool and all, but not really good for straight up recording. The effects section was also a turn off. While overall there are some really nice effects that come with Garageband the few that I readily use either were not available or were short handed. Take the compressor for example. I am used to adjusting my thresholds, gains and ratios. In Garageband however, the compressor is a single slider that has a value of 0-100. Beyond that there seems to be no DC offset or normalization plugins available. You would think for a recording software designed for life instruments it would feature some plugins such as DC offset and normalization. Tags: Apple Garageband impressions