While we’re waiting . . .

Our laptop broke. The hinges just snapped right off. Panicked that the new baby would be coming at any moment, and that we might not have the mobile technology to broadcast the earliest images, we bought a replacement.

The mac users among you know that macs come with a set of software known as the iLife Suite. These are the programs that make it unbelievably easy to upload, edit, and publish all sorts of media. Sally and I have spent some time using the movie and photo software, but until a couple nights ago, we had never attempted music editing.

Then I met GarageBand, a piece of iLife that I had never used until we got the new computer. If you like to sing or play a musical instrument, then you would love playing with this program. Typical of Apple software, you don’t need to get into the user’s manual to do some pretty sophisticated things from the beginning. Within a few minutes, I had recorded a song with three voice tracks and one instrumental track (my right hand, snapping – by far my best instrument).

Here’s the song. There’s a lot of noise, owing to the number of window-unit air conditioners in our house. I haven’t put much time into learning about GarageBand’s noise filters, but I suspect the best fix would be a quieter room.