Apples broken audio

I wasn’t intending to update my Mac or my iPhone to the latest versions of the operating systems that were recently released. My greatest concern was with Xcode, as I have a renewed focus on development this month I didn’t want any hiccups from Apple’s recent software QA problems. Most I talked to stated they experienced no problems and since I saw the updates as an excuse to clean out old Microsoft apps and do some general file management chores, I went ahead and installed the updates last week.

Generally I’ve experienced no problems and nothing really interesting in the updates as a whole. Until I can have a natural conversation with my computing device, I doubt there will be much in the way of ‘wow moments’ from any of these incremental updates (though I do appreciate some of the small advancements with SIRI).

What I didn’t give any thought to was Apple’s consumer software, like Garageband, which I use to produce our podcast Sleep Tight Stories. Sleep Tight Stories, and the others we plan to launch, are only viable if I can produce them in a very short period of time. “If only I had more time,” is a determining factor in many projects. To this end I have created a master Garageband file that I use for each episode, which is tuned for our usage and the equipment we have on hand. The latest version of Garageband breaks this in a couple of ways:

– As the screenshot illustrates the timeline is completely out of sync, ignoring the first 10 seconds where there is a sound file.
– Anytime I place an audio file in the timeline it changes the speed of the file, making all the sound files I’ve licensed or created unusable.

So lesson learned. Rolling back to a previous version of the software does not work. But converting files to wave format does for some. Perhaps I will take this opportunity to try Adobe’s more capable software, which will also slowly remove my reliance on Apple for all my professional or semi-professional computing needs.