How to: GarageBand’s ‘Learn to Play’ on a PPC Mac
When Phil Schiller et al demonstrated GarageBand ‘09 onstage at Macworld San Francisco, he didn’t mention that the hottest new feature “won’t run” on legacy PowerPC Macs. In fact, if you had purchased iLife ‘09, you probably wouldn’t have realized this “omission” until you actually tried to use this feature.
“GarageBand Learn to Play requires an Intel-based Mac with a dual-core processor or better,” according to iLife ’09’s system requirements.
That’s the bad news. The good news? That statement is only partly correct.
According to MacFixIt, that if PPC Mac users open lesson files directly by double-clicking, they should play, though older G4 Macs might not play them back smoothly. Best advice? Give it a shot.
The files you need to open are located here:
/Macintosh HD/Library/Application Support/GarageBand/Learn To Play/
Get GarageBand 5.0.1
GarageBand Update, 26.74MB
— This update improves overall stability and addresses specific issues with downloading lessons from the Learn to Play Lesson Store (more below)
MacFixIt reports that an Intel Mac is required to purchase additional lessons from the Lesson Store (Apple Store), which is a notion that I will be testing later tonight.
Also, much like the latest version of GarageBand, if the iMovie ‘09 system requirements are to be believed, PPC Macs will not run the application. However, Mac OS X Hints has tutorial on how to run iMovie ‘09 on a G4 Mac.
It is good that PPC Mac owners can use all or almost all of the features in iLife ‘09. Nevertheless, the writing is on the wall—when it comes to new software, the days of the G4 are numbered…
What’s your take?
Related Posts:
February 9th, 2009
try buying/downloading new lessons via http://fheusel.de/garageband/
February 12th, 2009
US instructions for downloading the next 9 free lessons:
IMPORTANT! Each time you don this -> make sure GarageBand is closed by choosing Quit from the menu or hitting ctrl-Q from Garageband.
Go to this link using Safari (not Firefox for this one guys…)
http://store.apple.com/us/lessons/home
Click “Download on the free lesson you want. You will see a bit of spin and then GarageBand will initialize. Choose download. You will then see the “Learn to play” error message but don’t worry – it is downloading. You can verify that it is downloading by trying to close GarageBand – it will notify you if you continue you will cancel the download.
These can be big, so be patient. When it is finished, you can then go here:
/Macintosh HD/Library/Application Support/GarageBand/Learn To Play/
and see your new lesson!!!
Close GarageBand (imporant!) and repeat until you have all the lessons.
September 28th, 2009
There is obviously a lot to know about this. I think you made some good points in Features also.