Thanks to recent employment status changes, my old G4 that I've been using in the office finally gets to go home. This causes my old iMac to move (I have to admit, however, that my iMac DV looks much better on my home desk than this beige monitor will). I was thinking that the iMac might resume its old life as a Mac OS 9 machine, in order to run Pro Tools Free. Pro Tools Free was a stripped down but quite capable eight [mono] track version of the Pro Tools audio software. I haven't seen any decent low-cost multitrack recording options for Mac OS X, until today.
Apple's new iLife application, Garage Band, has a lot of people excited. Me too (so long as it performs decently on a 400 Mhz G3). The virtual instruments and loop features don't interest me much, but the amp modeling and multitrack recording options are great. Ever since Apple bought eMagic, I've been hoping something like this would happen. But when the Mac OS X native versions of Logic came out, there was no mention of the low end version (known as MicroLogic). Finally, it's here in quite new form as Garage Band, part of the $49 iLife suite.
Although... I hate suites. But still, $49 for Garage Band and iPhoto (the two applications I do use, although I use iPhoto for organizing film scans instead of horribly boring digital photos) is a pretty good deal.