I finally picked up iLife 04 today and took a look at GarageBand. It looks to be a lot of fun, but alas, the fun will have to wait until I get more horsepower. my iBook lacks an audio in, so I can either dink around on the trackpad or buy the keyboard/controller I saw at the Apple Store. But then I find that a mere 800 MHz laptop is just not enough machine.
It wouldn’t even install on my old B&W G3. I’m going to work around it by copying an archive of the app to it, but I suspect it will be a waste of time.
So I’m shopping for G4 upgrades to see if I can make it work somehow.
One benefit to an Apple Store is that they have clearance stuff (an Airport Extreme base station in a dented box for $149) and the odd refurbished refreshed PowerBook or three, as well as lots of small items (iPod cases, various peripherals).
Paul - I found that RAM was the issue on my 800mhz eMac. I use mine for a lot of multimedia work (Reason, Cubase, and now Garage Band). The trick was dumping more RAM into it. I’ve 768mb, and things have been MUCH better from the original 256.