<updated below>
I recently acquired an iMic 2 to experiment with GarageBand (I bought the Monster iStudioLink with the same end in mind).
Some issues emerged, most if not all due to the anemic innards of mine. I realize GarageBand is a RAM hog, so these are artifacts of it not having enough memory to do even one thing at a time, let alone two.
- Playing multiple tracks while recording another doesn’t work reliably. The audio will just drop in the track being recorded. And the signal processing never shows up: you get unprocessed guitar (in my case) instead of whatever you asked for.
- There is often a delay between the sound you make and the sound you hear. This can be fixed by mucking around in the iTunes prefs and toggling back and forth between the buffer sizes.
- There’s some magic there that flushes the buffer and resets the driver. You may find you need to do it, oh three, four, many times. You may also need to twiddle the settings in the Sound Preference Pane: I think I may not have needed to do that, but hadn’t yet isolated the issues with the buffer size.
So I think my bottom line is: more RAM. The little bugger only holds 1 Gb, so I hope that’s enough. I’m sure the resale value on these is dropping through the floor, with the new Dual Cores coming out. Possibly faster disk: if I have to crack it open to add RAM, I’ll do the disk at the same time.
<grumble>
An update. I did reinstall the OS on an outboard disk, a speedy 80 Gb drive connected via FireWire @ 400Mbits. It seems somewhat faster but I think GarageBand won’t be happy w/o a lot more RAM. I still get the same issues with the audio dropping out and I have to assume it’s a resource issue/