Why is Avid / Digidesign suddenly pushing Garage Band rather than Pro Tools? Is there an implicit acknowledgment here that PT is too complicated / expensive for a huge swath of users? Maybe this doesn’t seem weird to others — of course Avid can still sell you the hardware, even if you don’t go for their integrated M-Box/Pro Tools package. Maybe it strikes me as odd because of the endless battles we’ve gone through at work over the question of whether PT is overkill for our users (we’re now teaching Soundtrack Pro to multimedia journalism students rather than Pro Tools, so I guess we landed somewhere in between).
Apple profiles ukulele master Lyle Ritz, who recorded his latest album No Frills entirely in Garage Band (at age 75 no less). And it does sound gorgeous.
You knew I was going to read this right ? 8-)
First a disclosure – I work for Avid on the development of Media Composer (and related products like XPress).
I think it’s simple economics and market opportunity for the M-Audio division of Avid. Anything that can sell more hardware is good for M-Audio. Whilst they make plenty of money selling the M-Powered bundle of Audio interfaces with ProTools there really isn’t a really low end music solution from Avid/Digidesign/M-Audio/Pinnacle for Mac OS X. M-Audio does have a GarageBand lookalike in Session but that’s a Windows only product.
So in the meantime – remind everyone using Garageband that M-Audio interfaces are an affordable companion. You’ll see both ProTools and the M-Audio hardware in the Apple Store too.