An integral aspect of my Internet experience is no more. As of July 15th Garageband will cease to exist. The site has been the primary host for my Bambo Syndicate music for several years. There are BS songs scattered amongst some of the other "Music 2.0" sites on the Net, but I preferred Garageband because there was no time limit on the songs you uploaded. I had a couple in my list that were over twenty minutes long. Most sites that provide this service have a limit of just around 4-5 minutes per song. The majority of my stuff...or at least the stuff that I want people to hear...is longer than that. I've got a selection of solo material on Garageband as well.
I am not too sure why Garageband is closing up shop. They have been in cahoots with iLike for some time now and that's where all the songs are going...the uploading will have to be done from a MySpace artist page which I'll have to set up if I continue using the service. That will depend on the song length restrictions. If they've been shortened I will abandon ship and get serious about my Bandcamp account. I would have done that sooner except that I have to convert all of my mp3s into wav files...I could kick myself in the ass for not mastering to wav files in the first place. Live and learn. It won't be hard to convert them, but somewhat time consuming....which shouldn't matter, either, since I've got nothing but time on my hands. The Bandcamp set-up looks to be a lot better than Garageband, anyway, so news of it's demise shouldn't be that big of a deal to me, but for some reason I am saddened.
Garageband wasn't just a place to host your band's mp3s. One of the cool things about it was that you could review other users' music and get feedback on your own. It was a laborious process, where you had to review fifteen pairs of two songs in order to submit one of yours. It would be paired with another and sent out for users to review and choose between the two. If you were lucky you could get quite a few reviews. Not all were exactly of constructive criticism, but for the most part you could depend on at least a little insight. I think I've posted the Garageband reviews I've received on this blog, so you can do a search of "Garageband reviews" and probably get all of them.
Nothing to do about it. Tom and his MySpace crew, pissed that all the site's users have absconded to Facebook, have become very serious about this whole "music" thing. I've avoided it so far, but perhaps now is the time to check it out.
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