Posts Tagged → garageband

On the New Mac Power Users Branding

The new Mac Power Users logo, a vertical battery with three wide bands, yellow, orange and red, from top to bottom. The title of the show is in white letters at the bottom, with the tagline "Fully Charged discussion." The Relay FM logo is visible in the top left corner, in a triangle shape.

This week’s episode of the Mac Power Users premiered with new music and a shiny new logo. While we kept the battery as the show logo, it is now orange and updated. Stephen and I dig the color orange, so this was an excellent addition and reflects our taste. I’m so happy to have Stephen as a co-host. This rebrand is the final bit of his adoption into the show and by the audience.

The prior music has a story behind it. I originally picked a royalty-free stinger that was part of the GarageBand sounds back when I wasn’t even sure if anybody would ever be interested in listening to the Mac Power Users. We tried to replace it a few times with new music, but it never seemed quite right. We once tried a new, short theme I played on my saxophone, and people hated that. So, we stayed with the original GarageBand music for all these years.

As we approach episode 750, the updated music is more modern and fits the show better. The opening music is the startup chime from a Power Mac 6100. The bumpers are a chime from the Quadra AV, and the ending chime is from the Mac LC II. Jim Metzendorf (Mac Power Users editor) worked on all these sounds to modernize them and make them better fit the show. JD Davis gets credit on the logo. I’m happy with how this all came out, and MacPower Users is now tooled up with logos, sounds, and hosts for a long time.

If you’d like to wear the new logo, we’ve got merch. You can buy tees, hats, and sweatshirts right now.

GarageBand Updates and Utility

I’m late with this news, but Chance Miller from 9to5mac shared how GarageBand for iOS and iPadOS has been updated with all-new Sound Packs, Producer Packs, and Remix Sessions to include some of today’s top artists and producers. There aren’t just new sounds to play with but because you get to hear and play with isolated vocals, loops, beats, individual instruments, and samples, you can get as creative as you want to make your own music in GarageBand. I’m excited to play around in GarageBand and just hear what some of the fun and weird stuff I can come up with.

I continue to think that GarageBand is one of the most underrated Apple applications. It brings real powerful audio production tools to everyone presented in an understandable way. We used to produce Mac Power Users with GarageBand. I’d have killed for this software when I was a kid.