Everyone knows computers now make it easy to collect, organize and play all your favorite recorded music. But what about the next step: actually creating and recording original songs yourself?
Personal computers long have been used to produce popular music. But it has often taken significant musical knowledge, and hundreds, or even thousands, of dollars, to master decent music-production software.
Now, however, that is changing, thanks to Apple Computer, whose Macintosh computers and iPod music players are especially popular with musicians. Apple has just introduced GarageBand, a free program for the Macintosh that includes many of the core features of costlier music-production software in an interface easy enough for rank amateurs to handle.

The move helps to solidify Apple as the leader in digital music, an arena in which it sees a chance to attract millions of new loyalists. It is aiming especially at music-loving teenagers and young adults, who may have bands but not the funds for expensive production software. Apple hopes these young musicians, and parents who want their kids to be musical, will opt for a Mac over a Windows-based machine. With GarageBand, you can sit in a room by yourself and create music that sounds like an orchestra played it. Or you can finally make that CD with your jamming buddies, even if no record company would return your calls. I've been testing GarageBand and found that it actually does enable even someone like me, with neither musical knowledge nor talent, to create a song -- not that you'd want to listen to it. It has Apple's typical touch: lots of power, but in an elegant, easy-to-use design. For a more seasoned evaluation, I turned to my son, Steve Mossberg, a professional keyboard player and singer-songwriter who has produced CDs using a variety of methods, from full-blown professional studios, to stand-alone recording hardware, to computers running expensive recording software. After working with GarageBand for a week or so, Steve told me: "For its price, this program is incredible. You can make a killer demo with it." He adds that professionals would need to supplement GarageBand with more expensive, and more capable, software. But, for amateurs, he says, "it's great." As part of his testing, Steve even wrote and recorded a song, complete with vocals, entirely in GarageBand. GarageBand is included free with every new Mac, as the newest part of Apple's excellent iLife suite of digital media products, which also includes iPhoto, iTunes, iMovie and iDVD. Owners of current Macs can buy it as part of a dirt-cheap $49 boxed version of iLife that includes all five programs. To make full use of the program, you need a newer Mac with a G4 or G5 processor and an external music keyboard, which can be purchased for as little as $99. There are no plans to make GarageBand available for Windows PCs.

The main GarageBand screen is a large grid onto which you lay musical tracks that are represented as colored, horizontal strips containing dots and lines that represent the notes (actual music notation isn't presented). Each track is anchored on the left side by a "header," a box that shows what instrument or sound the track reproduces. A song is a combination of all the tracks playing together. In a very simple song, one track might be a melody played on a guitar, another might be drums, a third might be a recording of you singing along to the other two tracks.
There are three principal ways to create these musical tracks in GarageBand.
First, you can use "loops." These are pre-recorded musical passages, suitable accompaniments for a wide variety of music. They are designed to be played back repetitively. One of the best things about GarageBand is that it comes with more than 1,000 of these loops and they are royalty-free. The loops include everything from pianos, guitars and saxophones, to flutes, harmonicas and congas. Many moods and styles are represented, from "Emotional Piano" to "Chunky Metal Guitar."
GarageBand by Apple Computer Inc. Price: Free with new Macs, or as part of iLife package for $49. More info: www.apple.com/garageband
You can shorten or lengthen their playing time in your song by just using your mouse. In Steve's tests, he found the drum loops "very realistic," and the horn loops "very cool," but he was less impressed by some of the other loops.
Next, there are software instruments you play yourself. This feature turns anything you play into the sound of almost any instrument you select. These instruments include pianos and keyboards, guitars and bass, strings, woodwinds, horns, and a variety of drums and percussion instruments, as well as purely electronic instruments.
To play these software instruments, you need some form of input device. GarageBand has been designed to use a keyboard you plug into your Mac. Apple sells a basic model from a company called M-Audio for $99. It just plugs into the standard USB port and works instantly, without installation software. Although the keyboard looks like a piano, it makes no sound itself and can sound like any instrument you pick. You just press the record button in GarageBand, and start playing, and the program fills a track, or tracks, with your own music.
You can edit and tweak the sounds of the software instruments, and even save customized versions of them. And, after you've laid down a track in one instrument, you can switch it so it plays back as a different instrument. For instance, I produced a track with a guitar software instrument, and then changed it to organ. You can also edit each software instrument track, using a part of the screen that looks like a player-piano roll with the notes represented as little boxes. Steve found the keyboard to be limiting in terms of touch and action, but you can use better ones if you choose.
Finally, you can get music into GarageBand by playing a real instrument yourself, or singing, into the computer. You just plug any electronic instrument, or a microphone, into the Mac's audio ports. GarageBand will record what you're playing or singing and turn it into a track that can be combined with loops and software instrument tracks to produce a song. Steve used this feature for singing, and found the quality of the recorded sound to be adequate.

For Steve's test song, he used nine tracks, including several different drum loops, piano, bass and flute software instruments, plus his vocal track. The whole thing took him five hours or so. Once you have your song completed, you can export it to Apple's popular iTunes music playback program, turn it into an MP3 file, and put it on your iPod or share it with friends via the Internet. Songs created in GarageBand and saved as MP3s in iTunes can be played back on any computer, including Windows machines.

So what are the downsides of GarageBand?
GARAGEBAND TUNES ONLINE to hear test songs created for review, go to:
Garage Band Review | Do What You | Talkin' to your in-laws | GBand Blues. You can also hear the compositions of other GarageBand users, and get music-creation tips, at several Web sites, including:
• MacJukebox: http://www.gbxchange.com/
 
• iCompositions: http://www.icompositions.com/
 
• MacJams: http://www.macjams.com/
Despite its surprising power and sophistication, the program still is much more limited than costlier competitors, whether on Windows or the Mac. This is especially evident in the area of editing and customizing tracks and sounds. For instance, the loops can't be edited, and there's no pitch correction.
Also, Steve discovered considerable latency, or delays, between key presses and the actual sound when he tried using an expensive professional synthesizer keyboard as a real instrument. Apple insists this is a characteristic of the keyboard, not of GarageBand.
By far the biggest downside to GarageBand is that it can easily push the capabilities of the Mac to the limit. If you have a lot of tracks, and use lots of customizing effects in the tracks, GarageBand posts scary error messages saying "System Overload" or telling you that your processor or hard disk are too slow to play the song. Both Steve and I got these messages on new PowerBook laptops Apple lent us for the tests, even when we were only playing the sample songs Apple includes with GarageBand.
You can get rid of these messages by changing some system settings, especially on laptops, to turn off power-saving options that slow down the hard disk and processor. GarageBand itself has an obscure setting that will improve performance, at the risk of some slower response time. By tweaking these settings, we were able to use the program without the error messages.
Apple soon will release a new version of GarageBand that tones down the scary messages, makes the performance options easier to understand, and changes the sample songs so they put less of a burden on the computer.
The company insists that the program will allow a typical user to create a song that includes two to three tracks of each type successfully. That was our experience, but you could run into trouble if you try to build a really complex song that overtaxes the machine, at least on an iMac, iBook or PowerBook with a G4 processor.
All in all, GarageBand is a terrific tool for amateur musicians. It's another reason to buy a Mac, and another feather in Apple's cap.
--With reporting by Katherine Boehret