Garageband vs. Audacity

Recording feels like an endless eye-doctor session. Do you like this one... or this one? This one... or this one.
Garageband's real-time filters can be a lot of fun but I'm starting to find a few features frustrating.

Garageband disadvantages

• Pausing recording. To pause you click the play button again this then creates a gap until the end of the measure. If you then record again it makes another section. You can join these two sections together but this is extra effort.
  
• Recording in correct track. I'm very often recording in the wrong track. I'm getting better about this. I would select a time within a track and think that would switch me to the instrument that is in that row.
  
• It would be nice if you could use metronome without recording.
• With Garageband muting and soloing tracks seems more difficult than it should be. Solo isn't really solo. When a solo is added then all other solo buttons are kept- it functions like a checkbox rather than a radio button. The mute button already functions like a checkbox.
  

Garageband advantages

• Adjusting for people's timing and tone problems- Due to my tin ear I'm having some trouble with detecting the changes in tone but it is very clear how it can moves songs toward the beat.
  
• Monitor works correctly- I haven't gotten the monitor function working with Audacity.
• Tuning feature- Tuning feature is useful for quickly figuring out what note you are playing.

Other notes

• There is quite a bit of background hiss that I need to find the source of.
• There are bad sounds with my 't's and 's's
• When I tune the guitar the strings are often sharp. I thought that strings over time, unless they are tightened, strings only went down in pitch.
• I wasn't sure how many beats/min to say the song was. I was able to use Metrognome to tap it out.
• There are two disadvantes to the in-ear headphones I'm using. A lot of the original sound come through so it is harder to get an accurate picture of what recording will sound like. Also some sound escapes the headphones and is picked-up during recordings.
  

Behringer uB502

If I was doing it over I would probably get the m-audio.

• Simplicity- Having one less cord would simplify this setup.


• Power- Since its bus-powered it would not use electricity when not in use. Behringer doesn't even have power/switch.
  
  


• Portability- The total weight including the powerbrick is probably quite a bit more.


• Multi-track- so possible to record two separate tracks at once and have two tracks go into computer.


• Sound isolation- no interference from laptop.


• Quality- m-audio's sound processing is no doubt better than the laptop's.
  
  

Sound recording

After fixing three problems, I got my computer to record yesterday. I'm using a Behringer UB502 mixer with a Sennheiser e825s microphone. The tape outs don't work using outputs from the mainline fixed this. I had to change the sound input in system preferences. Because Audacity only showed one option for sound input this made me forget about other options. Finally the gain had to be turned up quite high.
I kind of expected there would be that microphone hum but there is really no sound when I'm not speaking.
I'm dealing with a mess of wires.

Audacity
I'm still using Audacity to record. Their webpages have a good amount of general recording advice they also suggest Shure microphones such as the sm57 and sm58.
Shure's website has much more support for users

Audacity made the most sense for crappy recordings since it was so light weight.
I haven't tried Garageband again yet. But I may continue to use Audacity unless I find the UI confusing.

Bugs- The mac install is poor. The help file doesn't install. Also the folders are packaged outside of the app. This means I created a new folder somewhere in the applications subtree to house everything instead of in the main folder.
Metrognome
Metrognome is the best of the metronome programs I downloaded. It does sound like the beta version of audacity has a click track. Might be cool to see how the clicks match with my sounds in the waveform.

Is search making organizational document editors obsolete?

I was looking at Notational Velocity and thinking about looking at Voodoo pad but I'm wondering if search has made these irrelevant. I think it is still relevant on the web because you don't know what is available. If I wrote it though I know it exists even if I don't remember what I thought about it or where it is.

Cable reception problem

We have cable so it seemed odd that we would have a reception problem and what was even more odd was that it only affected the network channels. Since the signals all came from the source I couldn't understand it.
It turns out the problem came from having the ethernet cable box next to the cable line. I still don't know why it only affected the networks.

RSS on Firefox

It would be nice if I could get an RSS reader in Firefox. Using Vienna is nice but since I end up wanting to browse in Firefox it feels like I'm interrupting my train of thought if I go through all of the rss and then go through the windows in Firefox. Switching back and forth between each is even worse.
Also having two less icons showing up in my crowded dock would be nice.
Still Wizz is not good because it doesn't give short descriptions or have a preview pane.
Vienna does sync well with Safari but if you use Safari you already have a good integrated RSS reader.

I want to restrict my internet access

I want to restrict my internet access to an hour a day and still retain the admin rights to my com puter. Is this possible?