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Apple iLife '04 creative suite for Mac OS X

When Apple started repositioning the Macintosh two years ago as a ădigital hubä, they werenât just blowing marketing smoke. iMovie, iDVD, iPhoto, iTunes, and GarageBand ÷ collectively known as iLife Î04 ÷ have simultaneously raised the bar for, and lowered the barrier of entry to, the full creative potential of the personal computer.

To be fair, there are existing tools for media creation available for both Mac and Windows computers. None, however, can approach the comeliness, the simplicity, or the painless integration of iLife. Creating, for example, a slide show of photos and a homemade movie onto a slick-looking DVD featuring your own personally recorded soundtrack is certainly possible using other software, provided you have endless amounts of time and patience. Simply put, people with a life need iLife.

iPhoto: Fast at last
Appleâs digital photo album software has always been a solid, capable tool for organizing all your digital photos and turning them into albums, both the printed and the photonic varieties. What it was not was fast ÷ not until now, that is. The new iPhoto Î04 can scroll through many thousands of photos in seconds. My personal library of close to 3000 images can be spun from one end to the other with virtually zero lag on my 1.25GHz PowerBook G4 15" with 1GB of memory. Iâve always liked iPhoto and have used it for all my personal photos since the day it was released. But until this zippy new version came along I never considered using it as a production tool to handle the many hundreds of images we use to create our magazines. So long, iView Multimedia; iPhoto has turned pro.

Thereâs more than raw speed under the hood of this yearâs iPhoto. Your entire library is intelligently reorganized into sub-albums for each year, month, or roll. Smart Albums, like iTunes Smart Playlists, can update themselves based on criteria such as date, keywords, or user ratings. My favorite new feature is the translucent control panel that lets your preview, say, a new roll of photos and rotate, delete, and even rate them on the fly. It makes editing a large number of images enjoyable. Other faves include the ability to assign iTunes playlists as background music for slideshows and Rendezvous support for sharing albums or your entire photo library with other locally networked Macs. The new iPhoto Î04 is the most useful tool for digital photography since Adobe Photoshop.

iMovie and iDVD: Action!
Often imitated but never equalled, iMovie Î04 now offers timeline editing with snap-to aliognment guides, audio waveforms, and nondestructive editing. Overall rendering performance is improved, and yo can even output your movies to your Bluetooth-enabled mobile phone.

Most folks will want to use iMovie to create Hollywood-style DVDs, and iDVD Î04 offers 20 new themes, a handy DVD Map button for a birds-eye view of your more complex projects, and a new Resource Meter so you can see how much space you have left on-the-fly. Best of all, the ability to create full two-hour DVDs.

GarageBand: Rock on
The newest member of the iLife suite is a music creation tool called GarageBand. Combining digital audio recording with pre-recorded loops played by professional studio musicians, GarageBand offers even a tone-deaf non-musician the ability to piece together songs. The results can be sent to iTunes to sync with an iPod or to become the custom soundtrack to your slideshows or movies. GarageBandâs timeline metaphor makes the process easy and fun; even pros are finding GarageBand useful for whipping up a quick song demo.

To get anything out of GarageBand that you can truly call your own, youâll need to invest in a USB MIDI keyboard controller such as the $99 M-Audio Keystation 49e. Guitarists will need an interface as well, such as the $20 Monster Instrument Adapter. To record audio with a microphone youâll need a USB ot FireWire audio adapter box such as those offered by M-Audio and DigiDesign.

In the right hands, or even the wrong ones, GarageBand productions can be astonishingly good. It canât make you a better musician or singer, but it will raise the quality of your recordings to a level formerly available only to pros ÷ and thatâs what iLife Î04 is all about.

öDavid MacNeill
www.apple.com/ilife

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