MusicRadar

In terms of installed user base, GarageBand is probably the most popular DAW in the world right now, and according to MusicRadar users, one of the best.

This being the case, the release of a new version is pretty big news. GarageBand '11 arrived late last month as part of the iLife '11 bundle, and with it came a range of additional musician-friendly features. Let's take a look at what's new.

Flex Time

Pulled out of Apple's Logic applications, this lets you change the timing of your audio recordings/samples. Using it is easy: double-click the audio file you want to edit to show its waveform display, then click and drag at the start of the note/beat you wish to move backward or forward, and lengthen or shorten it by clicking and dragging at the end.

Changes you make sound impressively natural, though Flex Time does work best with monophonic material. It's also worth noting that adjustments are non-destructive - just click the Flex Time button to toggle between the edited and unedited versions of the file.

Groove Matching

Another present from Logic, this enables you to lock one or more of your tracks to the user-selected Groove Track. This can be any of your recorded tracks - just position your mouse pointer over the appropriate track icon and click the star button that appears.

Once you've done this, GarageBand will extract the track's groove and apply it to all the other material in your song. You can then deselect the tracks that you don't want to be Groove Matched.

The usefulness of this feature will really depend on the type of music you make. If it's straight-ahead 4/4 rock or dance and you want the majority of the arrangement to lock to the beat, Groove Matching works well, but if you've got lots of syncopated elements that are following slightly different rhythmic paths, you won't use it so often.

It certainly works as promised, though, and again, the implementation makes it dead easy to use.

NEXT: New amps and effects and How Did I Play?

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