Having some copyright fun with GarageBand.
[ Posted by Dan on January 29, 2004 | 1 Comments ]

Many of us older nerds have played with MIDI files before and played them on our old crappy computers and enjoyed popular songs played out in the style of childish muzak. On the Mac, Quicktime Instruments (a plugin) did a better job than that old Amiga at playing these files, but GarageBand improves on that be several orders of magnitude. Here's how to have some MIDI fun in GarageBand...

1. Use a Mac that is pretty fast (because GarageBand is kind of a pig)
2. Go download Dent du Midi
3. Find a MIDI file of a song you like, in my case, I used Google to find a MIDI file of the old "Popcorn" song by Hot Butter. There's plenty of files out there.
4. Install Dent du Midi, open it and drag and drop the MIDI file you downloaded onto the Dent du Midi window. Look on the desktop for a folder with the name of the MIDI file with "-GB" attached to the end.
5. Start a new song in GarageBand and drag the .aif files onto the GarageBand window (dragging the hole folder won't work).
6. Start applying instruments to the various tracks and have butchering your old favorites into bloody mess.

<sarcasm>
Hey Kids! Now you can violate copyrights in a new way! Releasing your own remix of old one hit wonders (or even new classics like the Simpsons theme) may be annoying to the original copyright holder due to the quality of the output you can achieve with GarageBand. So, get that Eurythmics groove going again and record you own voice over your own mix, edit the ID3 tags to look like the real thing, and upload it to Usenet (using Unison of course) and make it available on Kazaa (with your PC)!

Better yet, why not just steal the baseline from one song, the drums from another, and the keyboards from another and just sequence them together with zero effort in GarageBand. No one will be able to tell when you distort the hell out of everything so you can call it your own and sell it on your very own website!
</sarcasm>

Spin faster Mr Bono.

 

		FWIW, there is a pretty lively discussion board on Apple's site about GarageBand. -Posted by Dan on January 30, 2004 11:11 AM

Comment posting has been turned off because I don't have enough time and will to deal with the constant comment spamming. I'm very sorry and will fix this sometime soon (soon = before 2004 ends).