Is Garage Band a serious program for professional use?

Garageband does a little of everything. I use it for multitrack recording some use it to make complete songs with loops some use it for adding soundtracks and voice over to movies.

Now it can do what you want but you may be better off with a audio editor. Take a look at Bias Peak or Felt tip's Sound studio.

I would prefer a time line across the top instead of measure numbers.

Click the clock icon in the control window instead of the note symbol!

As for your mastering job: Since GB works with AU plugins, you can do almost anything with it. If you import your stereo mix, you have 3 effects slots available (two on the track and one on the master track). The only limitation is GB's 16-bit encoding.

GarageBand isn't the best thing for your needs. Amadeus II (www.hairersoft.com) is an audio editor with Audio Unit capability, so you can record into it, edit, do fades, add reverberation. It is $30, quite a bit cheaper than Peak and just as good for your purposes. To master to CD you could use iTunes.

Over the last ten years I could collect experiences with nearly all relevant music software of the world (due to my job). GB is IMHO the most underestimated music software.

GB's well-balanced relationship between features and simplicity is unique. And, back to your question, you can for sure produce music with GB in a professional manner.

Of course, there are limitations, e.g. no support of individual outs and a very limited internal signal routing. But I'm sure that GB meets the requirements of a huge number of musicians.


BlackBook Mac OS X (10.4.8)

Thomas is right in that GarageBand is an amazing piece of software writing: it's surprising what you can do with it. However for the specific needs of the OP its serious weakness is audio editing - the split and delete method works but isn't particularly convenient. With Amadeus (or something similar) you can just drag across, for example, the pause between movements and hit delete: you can select a section and apply a fade directly: and you don't have to export to iTunes (with the consequent several seconds silence added to the end) but just save. GarageBand comes into its own with multiple tracks, but you get more and easier control over a pure stereo recording in Amadeus. You could also try Audacity (which is free, though it has its quirks) - http://audacity.sourceforge.net/ (go for version 1.2.5, the update, 1.3.5 is in beta and isn't particularly stable) - it works quite well though personally I still prefer Amadeus. Peak LE is good but is four times the price.

Amadeus is a good choice. I personally record myself and my band using an iBook G4-800, an M-Audio Mobile Pre USB device (that I connect to the Roland digital mixer of my drummer, so in the MobilePre enters already the two stereo channels already mixed) and as software I use Apple Soundtrack Pro (that I already owned as I at times score movies). Apple Soundtrack Pro is surely not cheap (costs around 20 times Amadeus) but either is not costly, considered how much is a powerful Post-Production tool. With all it's filters it helps to obtain a very high quality sound from the most "normal" recordings. In example widening the recording sound range, usually resctricted a bit in the mid frequencies by the microphone quality. Yes you can do it all with cheap softwares, but none has the power of this pro tool. Anyway it required me quite some time of tries to learn to use it well enough and I realize that between 1-computer, 2-mixer, 3-microphones, 4-M-Audio device, 5-software it all sounds quite expensive (and it is, but we got all this gear in several years)...

If you have Amadeus, this is the cheaper, for sure.
But you may also use Soundtrack to post-produce the recording and bring it to a pro level.
Of course is not the only software who can do it (plenty on the market) but is the one I personally use, so I can't speak about the others.

Hope you may forgive me if I am bringing you an example of this type of recording (it sounds self-promotion, to myself), made by my band during a "jamming session" (yes, is weird to say jam when is new age the music genre). The group was made of 2 keyboards (one for the pads & the bass, the other one for the choirs), a djembe, a classical guitar and a Yamaha WX11 wind MIDI controller playing the flute (is me playing it). All was recorded in a single session (we do not record this way, usually, but record each line separately), then filtered (after we recorded our instrument, that were "crude", I added some verb and compression, then a final "multipressor" on the final mix to widen the sound). The WX11 was piloting an iBook with a Garaband software instrument, the two keys were piloting a laptop PC (don't know what software instrument it used) and an iBook G3 with Garageband software instruments, but it all got into the mix as soundwave and not as MIDI input. We even decided to keep it as it was even if one of the chords played by the choir wasn't the right one... But here is the example:

http://www.garageband.com/song?

Anyway I return to say: if you have Amadeus (or other similar softwares), this is the cheaper, for sure. And maybe you may obtain paragonable results spending much less money... I'm just telling you my personal experience, hoping to widen the option ranges.

Also: I never tried to record this way an entire concert, so I never went more than 30 minutes of consecutive recording before stop and record.

Also: I never tried to record this way an entire
concert, so I never went more than 30 minutes of
consecutive recording before stop and record.

That's a good point: GarageBand has a limit of 999 measures I think it is, so it won't under normal circumstances record a full-length concert (though HangTime has posted a fiddle for this) which is another awkwardness.

You might want to check this out for Garageband ... I 'm going to for sure ..

http://www.mhlabs.com/metric_halo/products/channelstrip/CSGB/

Put a million-dollar console in your GarageBand!
Metric Halo’s ChannelStrip has been an integral part of the sound of myriad Grammy-award winning, Gold and Platinum records, hit TV shows and blockbuster movies. The first plug-in to bring classic large format console-style ChannelStrip processing to Pro Tools TDM, ChannelStrip has been the critical tool for getting “the sound” for thousands of professional recording engineers, composers and musicans world-wide.
For a long time, the power of ChannelStrip was only available on the “Big Rigs”... systems costing tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, and ChannelStrip itself cost $699. In the last few years, with the increase in power of the Mac and the broad availability of professional native processing DAWs (like Logic, DP, Cubase and Nuendo), ChannelStrip has made the transition to a native processor in the form of an AudioUnit (AU). But even then, ChannelStrip was priced as a professional product. »Cut to the chase!


Enter GarageBand
Apple’s GarageBand has opened up new opportunities for music makers and podcasters to take advantage of the sonic goodness that ChannelStrip provides, and ChannelStripAU is 100% compatible with GarageBand. But, at $345, ChannelStripAU is a bit pricey for most GarageBand users.


The Brainstorm!
We were sitting around the conference room table here at Metric Halo trying to think of how we could make it so that more GarageBand users could get that sonic goodness into their compositions and productions, and we had a brainstorm: just make it less expensive! What a concept — ChannelStrip for GarageBand! 100% of the sonic goodness, features, presets and power of ChannelStrip for only $89.

I agree, Roger, however, AmadeusPro is the new kid on that block. I would look there.

http://www.hairersoft.com/AmadeusPro/AmadeusPro.html

Make sure you look into AmadeusPro at my link above. And yes, it is Universal Binary.

I love GB.

Now that I've said that, you can't replace a great mastering engineer with this program.

For starters, most mastering houses (worth their salt) will have thousands of dollars of analog equipment (that you can't duplicate with software) designed to enhance certain frequencies, EQs and compressors that add life (that can't be imitated by computers), and a set of ears that are "tuned" to do the job of mastering (which most people, including musicians and regular engineers/producers don't have).

Now having said that, you can make great sounding recordings/mixes with GB.

X

i also have another question, how can i use 'real' instruments in GB? as i'm using a macbook i dont really have a MIDI port, or anything really, to be honest im kinda new at this software and digital recording as i used to do everything on an 8 track! are there such things as MIDI to USB converters?

You should start a new topic for your question.

Midi to usb is a common device plenty to choose from. Midi is also not a real instrument it is just data, making it a software instrument. A real instrument would be a guitar, bass, vocal or the analog sound coming from your keyboard.

How would you get something you recorded in Garageband into Amadeus?