iLife ’04

Apple’s iLife ’04 may not seem like a toolset for the professional designer – after all, what are Final Cut Pro and DVD Studio Pro for? But anyone who dismisses these tools as redundant in a pro environment is either really cutting costs or truly bonkers.

iLife ’04 consists of five apps in all: iTunes 4.2 for digital music management; iPhoto 4 for viewing and sorting digital images and photos; iMovie 4 for basic video editing; iDVD 4 for authoring DVDs; and, finally, a new addition to the tool, GarageBand.

GarageBand comes with the premise of turning your Mac into a professional recording studio. While this is a slight exaggeration, it does prove proficient at creating royalty-free scores for your DV projects or a soundtrack for your portfolio at very little expense. Using a combination of Apple loops and your own instruments, you assemble tracks and mix them together – rather like Apple SoundTrack. A number of software instruments can turn your MIDI keyboard or electric guitar into virtually any instrument you can imagine. Some great guitar amp simulators are also provided.

GarageBand proves useful as a score-creation tool for almost every kind of project – and you can export your tracks as MP3 files for importing into other apps. Neat.

iLife ’04 works best when its component tools are working together. And, on the whole, it’s fantastic for creating portfolios. For instance, you can use iPhoto to import and manage any digital images or photos that you want to include, sorting them into different albums. You can then, directly from iDVD, create a DVD slideshow for mailing out to clients, complete with soundtrack created in GarageBand. Of course, if you want something a little more professional, you can import other images, custom buttons and video assets created in iMovie.

New to iPhoto is the ability to manage up to 25,000 photos, which the app can whip through at an alarming rate. Being able to organise your images by date or rating is handy, too, while enhanced slideshows, which give you the ability to specify individual image time on screen, and video-like transitions prove a welcome novelty.

iMovie 4 is undoubtedly a great tool for quickly cutting and editing clips, and the ability to edit multiple clips and transitions at the same time in version 4 is a good enhancement. Equally impressive is the ability to see and edit audio waveforms, and sync video and audio footage easily. It’s a decent update.

Similarly, iDVD 4 enjoys an impressive array of new features. Improved themes, better encoding and the ability to add iTunes playlists to your projects are all handy, but the main addition is the DVD Map – this provides a much-needed diagrammatical view of your DVD (much like those seen in professional authoring apps).

Overall, the iLife ‘04 suite is an essential addition to any Mac. If you have no interest in GarageBand, you may be a little hesitant to upgrade, as the new features aren’t that awe-inspiring. However, the speed improvements made in iPhoto 4 are worth the £39 price tag alone – especially if you use it to manage ALL your images. One complaint: the package eats up 4.3GB of your precious hard drive.