[LAU] Migrating from Garage Band to Free Software: Choices?

[Ralf Mardorf]

> On 27.10.2015, at 06:16, Luigino Bracci <lbracci at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> GarageBand have a huge bank of instruments, they sound really good and it is easy to use. Unfortunelly, it is difficult to install the bank of instruments ("soundfonts") in the open source applications I've tried, and most of them doesn't hace the quality in Garage Band. 
> 
> Or maybe I didn't know how to do it.

Software and soundfonts are two very different animals.
Assumed you should own good soundfonts, the sound quality of the sounds is still related to the way you play those sounds. Playing a guitar sound on a keyboard for example, in addition requires time consuming editing to get the same result provided by GarageBand's autoplay. You might need to use one track for each guitar string to fake hammerings and pull offs etc., IOW you need good soundfonts that likely aren't available for free and you need to play and edit what you played yourself. A professional drum sample player for 2000€ likely provides better sounds than a 200€ home organ, while the home organ provides many drum patterns and the professional sample player doesn't provide a single pattern. You can play the professional drum sampler by drum pads or by a keyboard. If you play the samples by drum pads, the result will be more natural than when playing them using a keyboard and after that doing additional editing, at least using the drum pads is less time time consuming. GarageBand's autoplay and a home organ's drum patterns could sound very good, but you are limited to given styles, that aren't your own style.
Resume: If you want to play hobby music in the style of other artists some software tools make it easy to do so, but you never will find your individual style. If you want to make art, you have to find your own sound, this is time consuming and comes with a long learning curve, you can't do it as easy as playing hobby music.
In reality it isn' t that black and white, I just try to explain a major issue.

Regards,
Ralf