A thought for creatives …

Actually, that’s a point …

Remember I mentioned Kelly, the other day?

Kelly, and a friend of hers, Ronnie, are both a bit … a bit arty, bless ’em. And I’ve got to admit, I was telling Kelly — guitarist and singer that she is — that, as she’s thinking of getting a computer, she’d really be better off with a Mac.

Mostly on the basis of one particular piece of software that new Mac comes with.

GarageBand.

Which, if you didn’t know, is part of the iLife suite that new Mac’s come with. (iLife’s made up of four programs at the mo; GarageBand, itself, iWeb, for basic website design, iPhoto, which is a basic photo cataloguing and manipulation program, iMovie, for home movie editing, and iDVD. The last of which I know Kelly will be familiar with, as it’s something I used to put together a DVD for her, and some mutual friends.)

But GarageBand is the one that will interest her, and other musicians.

Now, I’m no musician, myself, although I have used GarageBand to do some very basic sound editing. It looks a little overwhelming for me.

However, I’ve met a few musicians, over the years, many of whom use Macs, as a basic tool, combined with Logic Studio, Apple’s own in-house pro studio suite.

And, while only a few of them use GarageBand, now, they usually all agree that GarageBand is a good piece of kit to be starting with; certainly as far as making a halfway decent demo tape’s concerned.

Or whatever a demo tape happens to be actually called, these days!

But, as ever, it looks like there’s an open source alternative, around … !

Which is why I’m also going to mention Ubuntu Studio, here …

Now, as you may know, I’ve been an enthusiastic user of various pieces of open source software, Ubuntu included, over the years. So it was nice to know they’re experimenting with an artier bent of the OS. I’m assuming it’s aimed at those of us who’d like or need a Mac, but can’t necessarily afford one; and from the look of the Ubuntu Studio home page, that’s exactly what Canonical, the folk behind Ubuntu, are trying to do with with this version of it.

Now I know that Denny — who I gave a copy of the main version of Ubuntu to, about a week back — is happy with his new operating system; bar the very occasional crash — and crashes that are less frequent than the version of Windoze he had on there — he’s got a functioning laptop.

So, with that in mind, I’m going to suggest that, if you’re any kind of creative, you give serious thought to getting a Mac; at the least the basic software included with new ones is fairly good, for starting musicians and artists.

But I’d also suggest getting hold of Ubuntu Studio, as well, and playing around with it, to see what you can do. Just do one thing …

Let me know how it goes. I’ve not seen that one in action …