iLife '04: The Missing Manual

Joining Regions

What the Split command hath rendered asunder, the Join Selected command shall restore.

Combining two or more regions on a track into a single, unified one has a number of benefits. For example, musical riffs that you’ve painstakingly assembled and positioned turn into a single, easy-to-manipulate block. Copying, pasting, and dragging regions around is much simpler, too, provided you can select the music in question with one quick click, without having to select a bunch of itty-bitty individual regions one at a time. And, of course, you can loop a region that you’ve created by joining them.

There is, however, one condition: The Join Selected command is dimmed if you’ve selected blue regions—that is, Real Instrument Apple loops. It works only on two green regions (MIDI, aka Software Instruments) or two purple ones (those you’ve recorded yourself, or sound files you’ve dragged in from the Finder).

Tip

According to GarageBand’s online help, there are other conditions, too—but don’t believe it. For example, the regions you’re about to join do not have to be adjacent. In fact, you can even Shift-click two regions that are separated by other regions! They’ll still merge into one long region that appears to float behind the intervening ones—the only time you’ll ever see superimposed regions in GarageBand. Weird!

Figure 25-6 shows the routine.

Figure 25-6. Top: Select two green ...