In simple terms, a compressor takes your loudest and quietest sounds and tries to make them similar. Let me show you how to apply my settings within GarageBand and save them as a pre-set so you can apply them quickly without spending time in the ugliness of the Smart Controls pane.įirst, we’ll add a compressor. Compress your voicesįor every podcast I edit, I apply a basic set of plug-ins to make them sound better. I know, that was ugly, but it had to be done. When it’s not selected, what you’re seeing are the effects that are being applied to the single track you’ve selected in the main window. When the Master button is selected (and highlighted in blue), all the effects you select in the Smart Controls window are applied to the master track. The best way to think of it is that each track has its own set of effects or plug-ins applied to it, and then they’re all mixed together into a single master track which can have effects or plug-ins applied to it, too. When you click it, the entire pane will display the settings not for an individual track, but for your project’s master track. The Plug-ins section is vitally important, because this is where you can stack different effects and make your audio sound different (and ideally, better).īack to that top left corner of the Smart Controls toolbar. The new left pane displays all of the effects that are being applied to the current track you’ve got selected in the main editing area (you select a track by clicking on the strip on the left side of the editing area), as well as recording settings (useful if you’re recording straight into GarageBand, which most podcasters aren’t). (Yes, this is a lot of panes-you will need to make the GarageBand window as big as you can and probably expand the Smart Controls pane by sliding up the divider between it and the main editing area.) The Information button (the letter i inside a circle) will slide out a pane on the left side of the Smart Controls pane. This Smart Controls interface isn’t the greatest, so let me explain some of the other buttons you’ll need to use, which are located in the top left corner of the Smart Controls pane. The stack of plug-ins appears to the right of the Plug-ins header (center right). Click the Master button (also top left) to apply effects to your project’s master track. Use the information button (top left) to display the plug-in interface. The Controls view also lets you adjust ambience, reverb, and compression-a key concept I’ll come back to in a moment. You can actually set the EQ, which determines what frequencies of sound are emphasized and de-emphasized, in either view. By default you’ll see a bunch of dials, because who doesn’t like skeumorphic controls?Ītop the Smart Controls view are two buttons with controls what’s displayed in the space below: Controls and EQ. When you click on Smart Controls, the Smart Controls pane opens at the bottom of the screen. It’s on the left side of the toolbar, the icon that’s meant to look like a control dial (but looks a bit more like a quizzical Pac-Man to me). GarageBand calls its plug-in interface Smart Controls, and it’s accessible by clicking on the Smart Controls button in the toolbar. (Please note that while you can use these features for any kind of podcast project, most of the podcasts I produce feature multiple audio tracks-at least one for my microphone and one for a recording from Skype, but often many different microphone tracks from each of my panelists, which they’ve recorded themselves and sent to me.) Use Smart Controls The Library button (left, selected) and Smart Controls buttons (third from left, selected). Let me give you a tour of where these features are and make you some suggestions about how you can use them to make a better podcast in GarageBand 10. GarageBand 10, in fact, based on the same core set of features as Logic, which means you can take advantage of some plug-ins to make your podcasts sound much better-if you can figure out how to use those features. You can! (Earlier on Six Colors I wrote about editing podcasts in more depth.) And while it’s true that the latest version of GarageBand (version 10) lacks some of the podcast-specific features of GarageBand 6.0.5 and earlier, it’s not true that you can’t edit a podcast in the current version of GarageBand. Every Mac comes with GarageBand, meaning every Mac user has access to a free multitrack audio editor capable of generating high-quality podcasts. However, GarageBand is perfectly suitable for podcast editing, and don’t let anyone tell you different. I don’t use most of Logic’s high-end audio production features, but it’s got a few features that make it much better than GarageBand for my purposes. I used to edit podcasts in GarageBand, but switched a few years ago to Apple’s $200 Logic Pro. Warning: This story has not been updated in several years and may contain out-of-date information. Use plug-ins in GarageBand to improve podcast sound
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