iLife '04: The Missing Manual

Mixing and Publishing Glitches

There’s nothing more annoying than something going wrong when your masterpiece is finished. Here’s what to do.

Finished Song Is Too Quiet

If your GarageBand masterpiece arrives in iTunes playing far too softly relative to your other tunes, revisit Chapter 576 for tips on setting the master volume level before exporting.

But if the master volume slider is turned all the way up and the music is still too soft, you can also:

• Add the Compression effect before exporting. (Double-click the track header, turn on Compressor, and then drag the slider to the right.) Doing so boosts the softest passages and flattens the loudest ones, so that the whole thing remains at a more consistent volume level.

• Use the iTunes preamp after exporting. Once the song is in iTunes, you can also boost the volume there. Figure 33-8 has the details.

Tracks Panned to One Side Still Play in Both Speakers

Here’s a tricky one. Suppose you’ve used the Pan knob (page 573) to “place” a certain track’s instrument all the way to the left side of the stereo field, or all the way to the right. Yet when you listen with headphones, you still hear the darned thing coming out of both speakers!

There are two possibilities:

• Most of the time, the culprit is the Echo or Reverb effect that you’ve applied to that track. When you turn on these checkboxes for one track, you’re actually telling GarageBand how much of the master track’s Echo and Reverb to apply. You’re not really applying a different echo or reverb ...