It’s been pretty predicable in years past - during the week of the NAB conference, Apple rolls out a new version of Final Cut, which they can then talk up for the rest of the show.
Thing is, the show ends Thursday, and so far… no Final Cut!
Of course, Apple wouldn’t want to get too predictable with their software (and hardware) releases. If they did, potential buyers would hold off at certain times, knowing that a new version was just around the corner.
In fact, that’s exactly the case with me. There was a deal to bundle Final Cut Express with my G5, but I’ve only just realized that the deal only included FCE2… not Soundtrack. Now that I’m doing more and more podcasting work, both on my own podcast and with the occasional piece for O’R’s Distributing the Future, I’m interested in doing more and more multitrack work on my podcast, and for that, I’d like to start using Soundtrack. Which is why I’m holding out for a new version, so I can upgrade to “FCE HD 2″ and its bundled version of Soundtrack, instead of upgrading now and immediately being a version behind when Final Cut updates.
For now, I’m making do with FCE, which is fine (see below), but it’s kind of silly having the video preview windows taking up so much space when my podcasts don’t have any video tracks.
“Soft cuts” with Final Cut Express
Closing theme song full, then under track, then full again, then out, with FCE
Of course Garage Band is effectively Soundtrack-lite, but it’s impractical for real podcasting, since you cannot export an uncompressed master and then make MP3’s, AAC’s, etc. from that. That’s stupid. I realize Apple wants to push AAC, its favorite-son format, but not keeping pristine masters is a bad workflow decision, one that Garage Band forces you into. Presumably, the only way to do that with Garage Band is to keep the .band mix file and all the raw sources, effectively re-performing your edits if you ever want to go back and re-export to another format or higher bitrate (which you might choose to do as audio codecs and bandwidth availability continue their inevitable improvement).
Garageband CAN export to AIFF uncompressed audio. Perhaps, since it's mostly an Apple format, it's not QUITE what you're looking for, but it's definitely better than having 128kB MP3 as your master storage.
It seems silly, then, to spend all that money for Soundtrack when something pretty good is sitting right there in Garageband (which, in my opinion, is a very fine application).
To export, select "Export Song to iTunes" from the "Share" menu, and after a little repackaging, iTunes will present you with a compression-free version (which you can obviously mix down to MP3 or AAC as you so desire).
Happy podcasting!
Henry: Thanks for the tip on going through iTunes - I hadn't tried that because I didn't want to go through another app, but this approach sounds like it's well worth a try, since I do my MP3 conversion in iTunes anyways (to pick up the tagging for free). That said, the current FCE/Soundtrack upgrade is only $100 bucks for current FCE users... not that much more than iLife '06. Plus it means my wife doesn't get mad at me for the typical break-tacular that is a new iPhoto release.
I bought FCE 2 just about Christmas time 2004, only to see it upgraded to FCE HD about a month later. My only compensation was that I had toyed with buying SoundTrack at about the same time, but fortunately, I resisted the purchase. It was withdrawn as a standalone package and bundled with FCE HD.
I never bothered upgrading back then, since I never really got into using FCE. While I might be more interested in giving it another whirl now, I'll not spend anything on it just now because I know damn well that FCE HD2 would come out within weeks of my upgrade.
I thought Soundtrack was basically a dead product now. It's mentioned nowhere on Apple's site other than the FCE page, and the last update to it was in January 2004. I think at this point, GarageBand has picked up all the features that Soundtrack had excluding things like ACID loops and picking your export options (AIFF only).
If you find that GarageBand isn't enough for you, I really wouldn't rely on Soundtrack being supported for too much longer. It'd be great if you could buy Soundtrack Pro separately, but as of January, it's only available as a part of Final Cut Studio. I think your best bet is Logic Express, which is being actively updated and is definitely quite a powerful application. At $300 US, it's not cheap, but if you're just using FCE for podcasting, you could invest the same amount into Logic Express and get a lot more audio power out of it.
Still, I would reevaluate GarageBand 3 and make sure it can't do everything you need it to. It has really become a good application and should be quite good for podcasting.
Your wife may go mad at you for upgrading iPhoto, but I have found version 6 to be pretty good.
It seems to be a much more solid and stable release (5 crashed alarmingly often for me) and faster as well. I've upgraded 5 or 6 machines thus far and all have gone without a hitch.
Mike A: iPhoto 4 was a crash-fest for me, and the program has never handled sharing libraries between users particularly well. iPhoto 6 was a total beast about upgrading the library and forced us to chmod and chown all the photos, thumbnails, and data files to get the upgrade to work. All this to suddenly change (thanks to iWeb) where the .Mac photos get stored, so people who've bookmarked the kids' old page won't find any new photos. Apple's ill-conceived and ham-handed iLife upgrades always seem to lead to sadness in our house.
Final Cut isn't an audio or Podcast editor. The most amazing tool for anything audio related is Ableton Live. http://www.ableton.com
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