THESE GO TO 11: BEYOND GARAGEBAND
Where to go when you’ve outgrown GarageBand
GarageBand has its limits; it’s designed to make creating and recording music easy, but it isn’t intended to do all the things the Mac in a recording studio is expected to do. That’s why it lacks even really simple, standard features such as exporting ‘stems’ – separate files for each track in your project that you can then share with other artists or producers or give to a mixing engineer. If you do need to do that in GarageBand, you have to export the same song to disk multiple times, each time with all but the selected track silenced so that only one track is exported at a time.
Most of the music you’ll hear on Apple Music or Spotify was recorded, produced, mixed and mastered on one or more Digital Audio Workstations, or DAWs for short. The best known ones are ProTools, Ableton Live and Apple’s Logic Pro X, but there are many more including FL Studio, Cubase, Persona Studio One, Reason and Reaper. Some are free; some cost hundreds of pounds.