Thursday, March 02, 2006

One Of Those Weeks

It's shaping up to be "one of those weeks" where you end up further behind where you started.

Finally got cranking with GarageBand last night and did some recording. It is fun to record yourself and then listen back and go 'that sucks.' For one thing; you can more easily identify where the sucking occurs. I did a bunch of experimenting with effects ('just how much echo and reverb do I need to add so that my voice doesn't sound horrid?') as well as recording just guitar. For the most part GarageBand worked fine, but I discovered that after recording a three minute piece and playing it back, GarageBand stopped during playback and threw up an error message that there wasn't enough memory to complete the operation. It stopped, and I could restart the playback okay - nothing was lost in the recording - but it is rather annoying that it got lost performing a fairly simple operation.

I had heard that GarageBand was a bit of a memory pig, and I only have 512 MB of memory in the iBook, but still! Had it happened after recording 20 minutes of audio, or after putting several tracks into a 3 minute piece I might have understood, but two tracks of only three minutes?!

Now I'm faced with the next issue; add more memory to the computer, and/or look for different software. I guess the obvious thing to do is upgrade memory; I just have always been wary about memory upgrades after a particularly unpleasant experience.

The adventure continues.

Next issue: how do I upgrade my crappy voice?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I've never had any problems with memory upgrades, so I guess I'd just do it if it were me. You can't have too much memory.

Michael Murie said...

I have ordered a 1GB module for the iBook, which should goose it nicely.

But if I have problems installing it, you're gonna have to come fix it. ;)