Well, I thought I’d have a play with Garageband today and I’m certainly impressed.
A lot of the ‘software instruments’ it uses are MIDI controllable, and will do some pretty funky things, such as the classical guitar sound – it throws in random string squeek! Quite clever, but simple and it adds to the authenticity of a computer sound. My main bugbear with MIDI instruments in the past has been how rediculously unrealistic they sound. Even the sampled ones usually start to sound wierd as you get into lower and higher notes as you notice they are actually just pitch-shifted samples. A good keyboard will use samples for each and every key, but some instruments are just too difficult to do this on in any great way. Garage Band seems to do this quite well, and like most things Apple makes, its incredibly easy to use!
I think I’m going to use it for drum patches and things, as my recorder doesn’t support MIDI totally (it does, but mainly for controlling other things) so it’ll be nice to use this for MIDI and the odd bits I need and just squirt the audio straight into the multi-track. Well, that’s the plan anyway!