iLife '09: Real-world test

GarageBand
The basic elements of GarageBand are unchanged from before. Everything is still intact for composing songs, recording podcasts, tracking your band, and exporting everything from its multi-channel orgy to simple stereo newborn. The big new feature is Learn to Play -- Apple's take on musical instrument tuition.

Now, there are two points to make here. Firstly, this isn't going to replace a teacher or years of practice -- it's more like an extremely diverse and interactive tuition book. The second point is that quite frankly it deserves to be its own software package outright. But we'll ignore that for now because it's just too unfair to hold that against GarageBand.

Learn to Play offers basic lessons for guitar and piano, as taught by a very Apple-like tutor, in a very Apple-like sterile-white environment. You're introduced to the basics of how to hold or sit at your instrument, how the instrument works, and how songs are composed at a fundamental level. It's like a Music For Dummies book, only with sound, notation and high-definition tutors showing you everything in glorious detail with the Apple-like simplicity we've come to know.

You're not going to switch on your Mac and quickly pump out All Along the Watchtower -- or, sadly, our (genuine) personal favourite, Mutation of the Cadaver by Cannibal Corpse -- but it will help you grasp the basics, and far more than that bloody Catarrh Hero will. If nothing else, its beautiful presentation and accessibility may encourage casual music lovers to consider picking up the instrument for real, and guide along those that do.

But that's not all, Paul. Artists such as Sting and Norah Jones have worked with Apple to produce 'Artist Lessons', where established artists show you how to play their songs step by step, along with interactive notation, guides, selectable audio tracks, and even a talk about the story behind the songs themselves. Many artists have contributed and more are slated to do so in the future.

Each lesson costs £3.95, and all video contained inside them is presented in high definition. The choice of music won't appeal to everyone by any means, but for those to whom it does, it'll be an unmissable feature. For us, the distinct lack of technical death metal is a crying shame.