I’m a musician myself, but I spend most of my performance time in a large ensemble. I never felt like spending the cash on a music program that I might or might not enjoy using, and — this is also important — I didn’t have an obvious need for a loop- and sequencer-based music creation system.

Apple came along and created the need (perceived or real) with its DVD, movie, photo, and presentation applications. From there, users began to think that it would be nice to be able to make their own background music tracks. Then, right on cue, Apple brought out GarageBand.

For real? I guess I might as well upgrade Acid. I skipped 5.0 because they did nothing to improve the crappy faults of 4.0.

Maybe Sony finally got it right for a change…

ATA

Anyway, yes, GarageBand has brought all kinds of new users (and thus potential customers). We just haven’t seen very different products or attitude from the manufacturers that cater to them, certainly not from makers like Roland and Yamaha. Mostly what we’ve seen is some new and slightly-improved entry-level controller and interface hardware. That sounds like a missed opportunity.

NEW CUSTOMERS.

Joe Blogs and family are finding content creation to be easy and are buying other odds and ends to further enrich their projects. That market was nigh unapproachable prior.

Have you looked at the latest version of ACID Pro? “Sucks” has not been my experience.

But I’ll give it to Apple for giving away a host sequencer for “free” with the purchase of an Apple system. It’s good exposure for folks who may only have a passing interest in home recording, because it gives all Apple users a chance to try it before dropping any money on a third-party solution. Microsoft would be wise to follow suit at some point, like what they did with Movie Maker. Since MS is so cozy with Cakewalk, I would expect that should such a product be bundled with a future MS OS, that it would most likely be made in cooperation with Cakewalk. This really should have been included in the Vista strategy. I’m really disappointed in MS for not realizing the opportunity they were presented by taking this Apple idea, and bringing it to the larger PC community. After all, they’ve done pretty well off the strategy so far. ;-)

ATA

I think the fuss is that Garage band opens up a huge market of folks who normally would spend 400.00 for ACID. Apple didn’t invent the mp3 player… they perfected it at a time when nearly all mp3 players were crap. Parallel port mp3 players when 4 years after usb and 1394? Crap.