Step 4: Record your material.

    First, rewind the tape / record on your stereo.
    Second, press Record in Garageband.
    Third, press play on your stereo.
    Fouth, when the song is finished, stop recording by pressing the spacebar or the play button once.

Step 5: Saving your material.

    First, go to the File menu and choose Export to iTunes.

Garageband - Export to iTunest

    Second, iTunes will open up and you will see your recording. You can either rename it now or later.
    Third, repeat step 4 and 5 with the next song, tape, or side of the record.

Step 6: Finishing up.

    First, rename your recordings in iTunes if you haven’t already.
    Second, convert your recording to .MP3 / .AAC. (Optional)

iTunes - Convert to .MP3 / AAC

Note: Garageband records your recordings at CD Quality (44.1khz, 16bit). Converting to AAC / MP3 will lower the sound quality of your recording. Depending on the settings you choose, converting your recordings could significantly lower the quality. The trade off here is between sound quality and file size. CD Quality audio will take up a large amount of space. For example, a 4 minute song will be around 40MB as CD Quality, versus around 4-5mb as an MP3. It really is up to you if you want to have high quality and large files or lower quality and smaller files.

A Reasonable Workaround:

Convert to an MP3 that is at the highest quality – 320kbps. It will be nearly indistinguishable from CD quality and reduce the filesize a reasonable amount.

    First, go to the iTunes Preferences.
    Second, under the advanced tab choose importing at the top.
    Third, change the quality to “Custom” and choose 320kbps.

iTunes - Custom MP3 Quality

Step 7: Creating a CD of your recordings.

    First, in iTunes create a new playlist.

iTunes - Create Playlist

    Second, select and drag the recordings into the playlist.
    Third, select the playlist and click “Burn CD”.
    Note: Remember to check the order of the playlist and make sure everything is right.
    Fourth, insert a blank CD and let iTunes burn the CD for you.

More Advanced Ideas:

Let’s talk about editing your sound recording. Some examples where editing is necessary:

    1. The few seconds of silence before the song begins.
    2. The silence after the song ends.
    3. DJ / MixTapes where there really is no end – one song flows into the next.
    4. Batch recording and entire side of the tape / record at once to save time.

This can be done in GarageBand, although at a very basic level with the Track Editor. I would recommend this only for removing silence at the beginning or end. For the other situations, it is best to use a dedicated Audio Editor such as Audacity,

For those of you who would like to explore the more Advanced editing options using Audacity, continue on to Part II of this tutorial.

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