Radiant Chatter, GarageBand Gotcha

Tonight I recorded a wonderful conversation with two really cool guys about how they are using Radiant in their business and what it has done for them. Look for the first episode of the Radiant podcast in about a week (once I finish cleaning up the audio). I interviewed them over Skype and used Ecamm’s Call Recorder to record the conversation. Which brings me to my next point…

I recorded the interview uncompressed so that I could keep the quality as high as possible. Once I finished the recording, I used Ecamm’s included tool to split the resulting MOV into two separate tracks (me and the interviewees). I then proceeded to fire up GarageBand to layout the tracks, filter and do some editing. However, once I got one track into GB, whenever I would dump the second track in, I would get the original track duplicated.

I tried renaming the files, renaming the tracks, inserting them in a different order, etc. No dice. I was about to say, “Apple, you are not as cool as you think you are. You gave me a crippled product and there isn’t even any documentation that it is cripppled!”

After hours of searching the help and the intarwebs to no avail, I tried, on a whim, compressing the files using AAC or MP3 and then importing them.

Guess what. THEY WORKED!

So, the moral of the story is: If you want to edit/mix more than one plain audio track at a time in GarageBand, compress them first; or as I plan to do, clean them up, then compress them, then mix them.

So now it’s documented at least somewhere.