With the weakened world economy, content in general faces plenty of gloom and doom. Advertising models are severely weakened. But, oddly, in the world of music, there are some positive signs that the shift to decentralized, online distribution might actually be going well — and maybe economic pressures are simply ensuring the parties involved find some way to make the adjustment.

And music distribution is becoming wonderfully weird and diverse – maybe far more so than in recording’s so-called golden age, an era in the past dominated by racial division, predatory labels, and a few dominant big businesses. (Money is tough as always, but it does make you wonder why we complain so.)

One sign of the shifting landscape: online streaming site Pandora is now actually calling for more performance fees — for terrestrial (AM/FM) radio, anyway. Ars Technica has been doing a great job of following the issue:

Pandora now pushing radio to pay for music, too

It seems Pandora – along with other webcasters – was able to cut a deal on webcasting rates, in a battle that put music listeners and makers at the center of a legislative struggle. Legislators had been the ones to intervene and save webcasting, under pressure from listener constituents and even musicians. Pandora founder Tim Westergren told CDM how dire a failure on these rates could be.

What the deal means is that we can return to the rosier vision of how online streaming could help promote indie musicians, something Westergren put eloquently in a 2007 interview with CDM. But looking back at Tim’s arguments from two years ago, a central tenant was fairness — meaning big, corporate radio broadcasters really ought to face a level playing field and start paying musical rights owners. (Public radio in the US, by contrast, is likely to benefit from the online deal, as public stations increasingly rely upon wider online distribution and even pledges from loyal online listeners. Moved from Omaha to Montreal? You can still listen to your favorite station.)

There are signs that not only have online music pirates moved to download stores like iTunes, eMusic, and Amazon, but to streaming solutions, as well. In one of a number of recent studies, for instance, the UK is showing online file sharing down markedly as legal streaming grows. To me, the most interesting thing about this is that it disproves a long-held industry assumption that habits, once set, wouldn’t change. For better or worse, the online world doesn’t seem to work that way.

Meanwhile, the lines between “indie” and “major” are blurring quickly. Again, Ars Technica:

Universal/TuneCore deal opens major doors for indie artists

The surprise there is that it’s not so much about distributing Universal artists exclusively – online artist services firm TuneCore is now opening its membership base to Universal and visa versa, so that Universal can discover new artists and artists get licensing and mastering services from UMG without the need for exclusive contracts with the major label. In fact, if there’s one word that sums up the future of music deals, “non-exclusivity” seems to be it.

(clarification) As kj notes in comments, I think saying this opens “major doors” is a bit of a stretch. It opens a small door at a major. But on the other hand, the idea of a label becoming an open service shop for artists – for offering, say, mastering for a fee as part of their revenue – is new and, provided it actually works, interesting. And it’s clearly part of a larger trend.

But I think the best news is the spread of unusual means of musical distribution. Eliot Van Buskirk writes a round-up of favorites for Wired Magazine. (And yes, while top ten lists are overused, they’re brilliantly appropriate when you actually have ten really awesome things.)

10 Weird Ways to Distribute Music

From soup cans to music boxes to iPhone apps, there are a few underlying trends in there. One is experimentation in the delivery mechanism itself (including 8-tracks and cassettes, really). The other is in what you can do with the media, as with the interactive remixable iTunes album, or even art books that extend what an album actually is.

As these spread, though, I have to optimistically think that this is more than desperation or brief novelty. Distribution media haven’t just shifted from one popular form to another; they’ve imploded. We’re rapidly approaching a “minority majority” situation in which no one format dominates the others. We haven’t gone from the compact cassette to the CD to the MP3. We’ve gone from the CD to MP3s, MP4s, lossless files for aficionados and lossy streams for kids who love on-demand, vintage formats, physical media and art books and software. Instead of being strange anomalies, these other formats may actually be the new normal. I think in a way the business model doesn’t matter, because, let’s face it, a lot of art making is about losing money. What drives artists is loving sharing the thing they’re making, and finding someone who wants to love it, too. Some people will make a great business model around that, while others won’t.

But if you’re a music lover, we could be facing a new golden age. And if you missed compact cassettes, good news – they’re back.

CNET has a terrific interview with Rio Caraeff of Universal Music Group’s eLabs. Caraeff is a new breed of record exec – the kind of people we’d actually want running the industry. He’s a software guy and a mobile guy.

UMG digital chief on iTunes, DRM, and Android [CNET Digital Media]

The record industry has clearly seen the light on DRM, so that’s not really news, except that now you can see them saying it in public (and I imagine there has been long-running internal lobbying from those in the industry who got it long ago).

The news for me really what he has to say about the mobile space – his expertise. On iPod, he says what we don’t need is more proprietary alternatives: “I don’t think having more devices and more proprietary software or hardware in the market is the right answer.”

But most encouraging to me is how bullish he is on Google’s Android platform – and the fact that the proof is already available in the numbers available now. It seems the Web world is attracted to whatever is shiny, new, and not-ready-for-primetime, so bloggers last week forgot about Android and moved on to Palm’s (not-shipping) WebOS and Palm pre. That’s all fine and good, and WebOS certainly follows some of the same trends Android does, but let’s not lose focus just yet, right?

Universal worked with Amazon on their integrated Android store, and the results sound very impressive.

…now Amazon will tell you that Android is their single largest source of downloads from any third-party partnership that they’ve ever done. It’s a tremendous amount of consumption that we’re seeing once you integrate it seamlessly into a user experience that’s elegant and easy to use. It’s not 10 clicks. It’s very elegant and easy. We’re starting to see consumption increase significantly.

It’s early days on Android. There’s not that many out there on T-Mobile, but even with the small amount out there, they’re downloading and purchasing a ton of music over the air on T-Mobile.

This to me points to some encouraging signs:

Android has an edge for developers. Note that from a development, user experience, and deployment perspective, the Android platform was a big part of this success. You couldn’t do an Amazon store on the iPhone.

Android has legs. None of that would be meaningful if it weren’t translating to sales. But this says to me that the open Android platform can be a successful outlet, without necessarily needing a middleman like Apple. And it suggests some positive things for, say, developers selling software (or musicians doing weird, 99-cent generative music games) on the platform.

Mobile sales in general could be big for music. The whole problem for the record industry isn’t all that complicated: it’s that one medium (CDs) has been shrinking in dollar figures faster than its successor (online music) has been growing. So the industry just needs new growth. It’s encouraging to see that that could mean just selling music at reasonable prices, free of DRM. That’s a huge change from the previous plan, which appeared to be slicing 30 seconds out of a track, calling it a “ringtone,” and charging more than you would for a single.

There’s plenty worth checking out in the whole story. But this does make me feel even more excited about Android and what’s possible. The Amazon store is amazing: you buy and download tracks over the air, and then bring them back to your machine. Sure, you can do that with iTunes, and finally iTunes doesn’t have DRM on its tracks. But Amazon was able to come onto the device as a third party (working with HTC, Google, and TMobile). With Apple, the only way to get tracks back on your computer is to go through their iTunes conduit. With Amazon, you can do whatever you like. And the underlying stacks that enable the app are all open source, from the APIs to the developer tools. That’s a pretty marked difference.

Having a different mechanism for selling music could also mean that the UMG of tomorrow is very different from the UMG of yesterday. It’s certainly encouraging to think there are people at the company who see technology in the way a lot of the rest of us do. But this could also mean new opportunities for independent artists and smaller labels – and greater opportunities for everyone making music.

We’ll be looking more at the Android platform in 2009, and other trends in mobile. Now I just need to get myself a G1.

If you’re interested in generative and algorithmic music – music that evolves organically rather than being pre-composed in start-to-finish linear fashion – you won’t want to miss this site. Nodal is a free (for non-commercial use) app for developing generative musical systems and transmitting MIDI. You’ll need a Mac (PowerPC/Intel) to run the software, but even if you’re on Windows or Linux, you’ll find a number of interesting research papers on the site. vinayk writes:

The program is called Nodal – osx only, BEAUTIFUL interface, and FREE, it does a bit more sophisticated things but I basically plugged the output into sculpture – and it sounded amazing… well worth a look! And if anyone can tell me how to sync this to live or logic then i’d be much obliged!

Since it sends MIDI, it’d also be interesting to use this hooked up to visuals or triggering clips in Ableton Live.

Nodal Project Page, Tutorials, Examples, Research [Monash University]

I’ll be giving this a try soon. If you know of other generative software and research we should be checking out, perhaps we can put together a full round-up.

See also Noatikl / Mixtikl, from Intermorphic – developers who built the ground-breaking Koan generative system for Brian Eno. And we’re getting close to the release of the game Spore, which will feature a new generative engine and Eno’s composition.

noatikl: New Generative Music Engine, So You Can Rock Out Like Eno

Generative iPod? Deep Modular, Generative Music System Bound for iPhone, Phones, Windows, Mac

(Note that we learned this week that Mixtikl is not coming to iPhone in the immediate future. It’s available on plenty of other platforms, however, and if you’ve got a Mac for both, let the generative music making commence!)

Ed.: Deckadance DJ software has been on our radar for some time on the DJ software front: lots of MIDI control (with one caveat; see below), agnostic support for multiple vinyl timecode systems, and most interestingly the ability to run the whole app as a VST plug-in. Dreams of loading Deckadance into Ableton Live danced through DJs heads. The app even added built-in support for Nintendo Wii remotes. But the software, from the development house that brought us FL Studio (”Fruity Loops”) was Windows only. No more:

Image-Line has just released the latest beta of Deckadance, 1.20RC3. This version is the first version to include support for OS X. The developers have written on the Deckadance forums that the port to OS X required almost a complete rewrite. Early reports are mostly positive, with a few bugs (mostly on the Windows side reported here and there). Other notable changes include:

• Redesign of the Digital Vinyl System panel. It includes now a real-time signal spectroscope and an easy-to-use interface
• Vinyl timecode control of decks inside Live and Live LE
• Native support for Numark Total Control console

However, there’s no reports of a fix to allow pitch bend messages for deck pitch control, a personal obsession of mine. [Ed.: Wally, fairly sure you're not alone on that! -PK] Still, though, kudos to the Deckadance team for getting the OS X version out the door before the end of the year. Let’s hope 2008 holds great things in store for Deckadance!

1.20RC3 Beta Announcement [Image-Line Forums]
Windows beta download; Mac beta download

(You must be logged into the free Image-Line forums to use the download links.)

Image-Line has also posted a video showing Deckadance running on both Mac and Windows:

plasq, the wonderful people who brought us Skitch and Comic Life, have been giving their audio tools new lives rather than orphaning them. We’ve already seen plasq’s live performance-savvy instrument and effects host Rax show up as an Audiofile Engineering product, and AE in turn recently promised in comments that great things were coming for Rax.

Now, we have some great news for Wormhole2: it’s gone open source:

Wormhole2 @ Google Code

Product Page and Features (still up at press time)

Discussion at plasq.com Forum

End users can just download AU (Mac) and VST (Windows) binaries, plus a PDF manual. It’s even a Universal Binary for Intel Macs.

Developers: because VST isn’t an open-source format, you have to download Steinberg’s VST SDK to use it, but plasq will actually go the trouble of sending you the files once you agree to Steinberg’s license agreement. (AU isn’t either, but Apple ships all the developer tools you need with the OS.)

I’m really hopeful someone will build something cool with this. You’ll need something else to route MIDI (though the Mac does that over networks out of the box, cough, Windows). But there are powerful audio-over-network options here which would be hard to work out on your own. It’s unclear how useful Wormhole2 will be to the existing, open source JACK audio project, which is also capable of routing audio between apps and (via netjack) networked computers. JACK uses a client/server model as opposed to Wormhole’s plug-in approach. But for end users, having both tools available free is a very good thing, and the price tag is an extra incentive to be brave and see if these tools can help power up your rig.

Universal CEO Doug Morris makes an easy target for the blogosphere. This is the old-school record industry executive who called iPod owners thieves and wanted broad legal enforcement against piracy — enforcement that, in the end, seems to pale in comparison to the revenue generated by actually offering online sales. So, now that Morris has gone up against Wired, the blogosphere can easily see him as a dinosaur.

Universal’s CEO Once Called iPod Users Thieves. Now He’s Giving Songs Away. [Wired News]

But as artists, all of us face a fundamental problem: how do you put value on something that’s ephemeral? It’s an age-old issue that has faced musicians explaining to their parents why they don’t want a real job, and artists to their patrons when affixing a price tag. (And as we’ve seen from veteran software developers and the BanPiracy debate, software “artists” face the same challenge.) Sure, people love to talk piracy, because it’s easier to talk in those terms. Piracy is theft, theft is crime, and crime is bad — including making a mix tape for a friend. Or all music should be free, and never mind that artists need health insurance and rent money. They’re black and white extremes, entirely couched in moral/philosophical terms, neither of which contend with how to solve the actual real-world problem (at least, not if you stop there).

And then I came across this quote from Morris in the interview:

“Really, an album that someone worked on for two years — is that worth only $9, $10, when people pay two bucks for coffee in Starbucks?” Morris sighs. “People never really understand what’s happening to the artists … If you had Coca-Cola coming through the faucet in your kitchen, how much would you be willing to pay for Coca-Cola? There you go,” he says. “That’s what happened to the record business.”

Wait a minute… a liquid that comes out of your faucet for free, but is also sold, in bottles, at retail. How much would you be willing to pay? Hmmm… this sounds familiar.

It’s called water.

And how much are people willing to pay for the privilege of packaging, control over subtle variations of taste, and mobility? Quite a lot, as it happens. More than Coke. It’s not uncommon to see Coke for $1.50 at a grocery, and $2.00 or even $3.00 for water. In fact, Coke might have gone for the running water through the tap idea, as additional revenue and a way to increase consumers’ taste for the stuff.

Oh, yeah, and that tap that runs water music into your home for free … the radio? Not a new invention. None of these things is easy to monetize, mind you (ask your local public radio station during their pledge week), but it’s clear there are ways to make people see value.

If this isn’t a lesson for the music industry in the digital age, I don’t know what is. Find a way to increase consumer perception of value, even if the thing supposedly can be gotten readily. Find a way to sell the packaging, and find a way to make that purchase part of people’s daily routine. (And music, in case you haven’t noticed, is ubiquitous these days whether you touch a torrent server or not.) And maybe the bottled water people could teach us a thing or two.

As it happens, Universal’s digital music schemes seem to be a decent start strategically. They have two prongs: one, distribute music, DRM-free, in multiple stores, breaking up the Apple iTunes/iPod monopoly with music that can be bought and played everywhere. Two, provide subscription music, with DRM, for free, subsidized by hardware manufacturers. Now, if the subsidy makes business sense for manufacturers, I honestly don’t see anything wrong with that. Universal ransomed Microsoft over the Zune, which I personally found ridiculous, but now at least the hardware makers get something in return. And while DRM on music you’ve paid for, on subscription services it actually makes some sense. In fact, usually if you really grow attached to music and want to make it mobile, you’d then buy non-DRMed music. Problem solved.

The only really strange twist: a new breed of Apple iPod fanboys, who get their panties in a bunch over the idea of music being bought anywhere other than iTunes and played on anything other than iPod. (I miss the Mac fanboys who fought for you when IT wanted to install a Dell with Windows ‘98 and Novell. Those were the days.)

Personally, I don’t see the problem. With DRM-free MP3s, any device can be a playback device — iPod included. And as far as subscriptions, if you don’t want them, ignore them and buy the MP3s. If you do want them, you can already play Rhapsody over the Web with a Mac and Linux. Firefox + Rhapsody + Linux works quite nicely, in fact. You can’t use them on mobile devices yet beyond Windows, but that seems like a fixable problem — a technological problem, particularly since these devices should in future connect directly to wifi or phone networks, not your computer.

But artists don’t have to worry about such things: you want your music everywhere. And if, in fact, Universal is a dinosaur, then the question is, can you find someone else who does know how make water thicker than Coke?

Native Instruments remains the unchallenged heavyweight of instruments and effects. Apple’s Logic Studio 8 recently got a formidable upgrade and a big price drop (US$499), but its bundled instruments and effects, behind cosmetic improvements, are largely unchanged from previous versions. Cakewalk, Digidesign and others have also gotten in the ring, but no one can match up to the insanely massive collection of sound production and mangling in NI’s software. So, when NI offers an upgrade, we notice. I’ll be meeting up with NI next week at the AES show for a full preview of the new KOMPLETE kitchen-sink bundle and updated individual apps (plus KORE 2, due in November), but here’s a quick look.

• New Sampler: KONTAKT 3 is the latest version of NI’s flagship sampler, and in terms of raw breadth and depth of features, Kontakt appears to remain at the top of the heap. New in this version: a 1000-instrument, 33 GB sample library, a new looping/slicing/syncing Wave Editor, new envelopes, new amp and cabinet emulations, better browsing, and more. I’m curious to see how the Performance View and the updated KORE stack up to OnStage in Logic 8 (or even what it’s like using both together).
• New Guitar Effects: GUITAR RIG 3 adds new amp models, new matched cabinets, new effects (tape echo and ring mod!), and more. Guitar effects competition is brisk, but Guitar Rig’s edge to me has been its range of sound possibilities, straight out to the bizarre/experimental.
• Addition of Massive: MASSIVE is NI’s latest soft synth, especially geared for “sonic impact” (read, great basses and leads), with drag-and-drop, semi-modular sound creation.
• Lots of updates: Refreshed versions of previous synths include Absynth 4, Akoustik Piano, Battery 3, B4 II, Elektrik Piano, FM8, PRO-53, and Reaktor 5. With the exception of Reaktor, most of these have gotten feature improvements lately, and all have been updated for Vista and Intel Macs.

Partial Bundles, Lower Pricing

One problem with Komplete is that it has so much in it that it really is overkill for many people. There are two fairly sensible partially-complete (INKOMPLETE?) bundles priced at US$449/EUR 399 worth considering. “CLASSICS” includes Akoustik Piano, B4 II, Elektrik Piano, and PRO-53, and seems ideal for a gigging keyboardist. “SYNTHS” hits the electronic lovers with Absynth 4, FM8, Massive, and PRO-53. Still, you lose the sampler, and even as a non-guitarist I’ve found Guitar Rig to be very useful for effects, so if you do have the cash, you should weigh your various options.

KOMPLETE 5 is cheaper now, too: US$1149 / EUR 999 for the whole bundle, and less if you qualify for upgrade pricing. As a software instrument advocate, I have to notice both in my own work and what I’d suggest to others, this makes for a pretty incredible deal. Add Komplete to a host like Logic Studio, SONAR, or Ableton Live, load onto a $1000 laptop, and you’ve got an all-in-one production powerhouse that still costs about the same as a high-end workstation keyboard, even after you add in some extra hardware. In terms of sonic range and flexibility, there isn’t really anything in hardware that compares to the sound set. (Yes, there are still reasons to choose hardware, some having to do with intentionally having less choice. But I’m just sayin’.)

No More Spektral Delay and Vokator

That covers the good news. Here’s the bad news: Spektral Delay and Vokator, two of the more unique effects in NI’s stable, have been end-of-lifed. This to me is really unfortunate, particularly in the case of Vokator. (One option that’s out there: ELS Vocoder, though it requires a dongle, which to me is a big deal-killer.)

Also, there’s no direct equivalent to either in the existing NI suite. Reaktor has some built-in effects and even vocoders, but they’re not quite the same. I’m hopeful this will convince NI to offer these tools free for download; right now, they’re just gone.

Fortunately, NI did update both effects prior to discontinuing them. They’re both Intel Mac-native and Vista-ready, and they’re very stable and mature in their final versions. The problem will be just getting hold of them. I’ll let you know if NI decides to make them available — maybe some well-reasoned, thoughtful letters in support of this will help convince them.

While neither will get any further updates or sales, they do remain supported, and join Intakt and others in the forums:
Discontinued Products [Native Instruments]

Ship Dates

October 1 is the promised date for KOMPLETE 5 and associated updates (KONTAKT 3, GUITAR RIG 3), with KORE 2 following in October. We’ll have a look at all of it at AES, so stay tuned.

KOMPLETE 5 [Native Instruments]

Rax, the clever audio effect and instrument host for Mac, got a major update last year with performance rigs, custom visualizer support, and a slick UI designed by plasq. It’s an ideal tool for loading up some instruments and effects and playing on your Mac, especially if you want software that gets out of your way while you play another instrument or sing and don’t need a full app like Logic or Live onstage. But it never caught on with Mac users, even after I wrote a glowing review in Macworld. And it has certainly been overshadowed by more popular plasq products for the general Mac market, like Comic Life and the upcoming Skitch. So it was clear this unknown gem needed a new home.

Happily, Rax has now changed hands to another of our favorite small developers, Audiofile Engineering. Their Wave Editor has won over CDM’s game composer / contributor Brent, so we’ll be curious to see how they handle Rax. They’ll be supporting existing customers (few of them as there are out there, I expect there’s a good chance they’re reading this). Their 2.1.0 update is a minor release to bring Rax into the AE fold:

• New Preferences window
• Integrated Help Desk
• Updated About Box
• New licensing system
• Removed PYMIDI framework, replaced with Audiofile MIDI framework

Interestingly, in their press release the developers at AE note that Rax, with its pure-Cocoa implementation and unique design, was an inspiration for their tools. (Also inspired by Rax: fluqe OnStage, a Logic Pro set management tool used by the Arctic Monkeys, among others, that I hope got some notice from the folks at Apple for the next Logic!) And Rax will continue to grow based on its existing features:

• 16-channel mixer, with 25 effects racks
• Setup of sets and songs for live gigs, with notepads / lyrics for each and preset management for your AU plug-ins
• MIDI file playback
• Live audio inputs
• One-click recording
• Live visualizer support (via Quartz Composer)
• Slick UI redesigns of the included, free Apple plug-ins
• OnStage view that you can see easily while you play an instrument

For more information:

About Audiofile Engineering
New AE Rax Product Page
Rax announcement at plasq

FXpansion has released the long-awaited Guru 1.5 update, which fixes numerous outstanding bugs and incorporates almost 100 new features. What’s amazing is that they’re offering this update for free to existing users. Again, this is another case of a company that could have slapped a major new version number on it and charged at least a modest fee for the update to existing users, and it’s evidence of FXpansion’s generosity and commitment to their customers that this update is being offered for free.

Among the new features:

• Expanded audio export options, with options to render pads, tracks, engines or full mixes, with drag n drop to the host application or even back inside Guru for further mangling. I can see this being seriously useful for loop slicing and mangling
• Expanded slicer functionality with greater precision and a new velocity implementation
• Adjustable randomizer with options to control the amount and depth of randomization
• New sample options for reversing samples, new layer modes and pre delays for fine tuning
• Improved file browser functionality
• Expanded sample library
• Windows Vista & multi-core support
• Expanded keyboard support so every function in Guru can be almost completely controlled without the mouse
• Widely expanded MIDI implementation, with much more control over UI elements
• Drop-out free audio engine, allowing for seamless transitions between kits while previewing

In short, not a whole lot of radically new functionality, but the workflow enhancements and expansion of existing functionality make this update a must-have for existing users, and will likely be enough to tip the fence sitters. I’ve used Guru on a friends machine, and while I really dug it, it just seemed to be missing a few things here and there. With this update, they’ve addressed all those problems by listening to their users on what could (and needed to be) improved. Consider me officially off the fence. When Guru was first announced, it held the promise of becoming the ultimate software beatbox. With the 1.5 update, Guru has officially arrived.

New in 1.5

But what about serious music making? There are still reasons to keep the latest GarageBand around. A streamlined interface makes applying effects much easier than before. Multi-take recording could make this version ideal as a sketchpad for recording ideas, even if you do the rest of your work in another tool. And finally, you can print notation.

Here’s a visual tour of the new software (click the thumbnails to open an interactive gallery):

So, what about serious “pro” users? (I never liked the term “pro” in that I think it vastly oversimplifies the market, but you get the idea.) A Wikipedia article has been compiling examples of celebrity users, at least, which tend to fit in basic categories:

• Loop users: This is probably the worst possible way to be recognized using GarageBand — having someone hear a loop they know comes with the program. Examples: the movie Constantine, and the fifth season of 24.
• GarageBand for demos: Here’s a better way to use GarageBand — as a quick and dirty demo / sketch maker. Artists in this category: Courtney Love, Fred Durst from Limp Bizkit, Panic! At The Disco.
• GarageBand for fan remixes: Erasure and Nine Inch Nails have both let fans remix tunes with GarageBand. Interestingly, there have been more “fan remix” projects in Acid and Pro Tools, among others. Ableton Live would still be my choice for fan remixing, personally, but mostly we’ll have to see how this trend pans out.

I expect there are many more — I see Mac hardware almost every time I’m hanging around big-name musicians — though I also know many use other tools, like Live and Reason. GarageBand has perhaps gotten extra hype because it comes from Apple and it’s free. But it does have its uses: there are some nice instruments and effects there, and it works well as a linear sketchpad along other tools (including Logic, via Logic export).

Do you use GarageBand? Or did you dump the multi-gig GarageBand install to save hard drive space and leave you to focus on other tools?