MusicTech@UNCG

Archive for the ‘Software’ Category

What do you do if you want to create a PDF file from any document that can be printed? If you’re using a Mac, all you need to do is select “Print” and then choose the “PDF” option and your done. Not so easy on a Windows machine. This is where PDFCreator comes into play. It creates a virtual printer on your Windows computer so that when you want to create a PDF file, just select “Print” and then choose the PDFCreator as your printer. This had been my PDF printer of choice for Windows for the longest time, however with the release of Vista, it stopped working. Now that program has been updated to work with Vista and Windows 7, it ranks once again as my top choice.

Visit the PDFCreator website for the most recent version.

  PDFCreator (14.9 MiB, 47 hits)

Several times I have been asked to recommend an audio software package for Windows that is similar in scope and simplicity as GarageBand on the  Mac. I’ve read about Mixcraft before and suggest that people look into it, but this week I am going to download the demo and do a comparison between these two projects. I will try to create the same song in both programs, list the differences in work flow between them, and then post MP3s of the resulting tunes for quasi-sonic comparison (both being mangled into the mp3 format). For equality sake, I will export the resultant songs to the native WAV or AIFF and then encode those files to MP3 using the same program for both to avoid any differences in encoder quality between the Mac and PC. Look for the complete comparison by the end of the week.

Mixcraft 4 – Affordable multi-track audio and MIDI recording software.

Brief article excerpted from a PDF book about GarageBand. Contains information about combining two GarageBand projects into one, something I have been trying to figure out with a few of my own ideas.

Macworld | Learn GarageBand tips and tricks