[musictlk] Accessible Music Production Software

[Kevin Reeves]

As someone who uses both PT and Garageband on a daily basis, here's what pro tools does that GB can't.

1. Comping of tracks.
In Pro TOols, you can have separate takes associated with different playlists where you can copy paste the best takes for each section onto a composite playlist, which will then make up your newly edited track.
2. Extremely fine editing and nudging.
Because GB doesn't support extremely low zoom levels that can be utilized via the keyboard, it is not possible to accessibly trim and nudge regions at the frame level. It is also not possible to give GB a specific number of ticks to nudge by in order to make accurate edits.
3. Setting midi inputs.
GB does not support multiple midi devices. It is not possible to set an input device per track or tell GB to use a different device in the prefs.
4. Retaining Bank/patch info in a project.
While GB does support sending bank and patch info, it does not send it as sysx data to the hardware or soft synth, so all patch and bank info is lost when project is reopened.

I absolutely love gb. It allows me to put demos together very quickly, or utilize some of the great sounds when working on projects for clients.
However, due to the things mentioned above, I can't use it as a full time daw.

The ironic thing here is that it does things in 1 click that takes multiple steps in Pro TOols, like loop locking, time and pitch stretching, Autotuning and quantize, auto ducking, etc.
Hopefully, logic 10 will be more accessible than the current version, and we can have the best of both worlds.
It's all about the right tool for the job.

Kevin