Ah. I bought my iBook several years ago and it wasn't standard then. I'm glad they are now.

Is that a good idea? Honestly, I'm a little wary of buying something used.

I've purchased two Mac Towers, an iBook, and two Powerbooks from Apple reconditioned sales and they've all been great.

I've purchased two Mac Towers, an iBook, and two Powerbooks from Apple reconditioned sales and they've all been great.

That's really good to know. I hadn't considered the option before but it seems to make sense.

Apple's describes Garageband as having recording capability but I'm not sure I understand how it works. I know you can, like, plug your guitar or a keyboard into the computer and record that way but I want to record my whole band playing. (I think maybe my guitarist might know how we can do this, though. Hooray! for people who are not the lead singer and know about equipment-n-stuff)

And thanks so much for your input everybody. I'm getting less scared and more excited now!

Be very excited! I have a deep deep love for my 3 year old iBook (graphite clamshell).

Yes, Garageband allows you to record. If you want to record your whole band at once then you'll need a multichannel audio interface. One of the Firewire ones would make the most sense. Garageband makes use of Apple's Core Audio drives so as long as the card is OS X compliant then it should work with no problems. You can do 8 tracks plus 1 virtual track of recording simultaneously in Garageband 2.0. M-Audio and Mark of the Unicorn both make good firewire audio interfaces with Mac Drivers.

If you are going to do more recording you might want to look at a more expensive option like a Digidesign 002 Rack which includes ProTools LE. There is also Logic Express from Apple which gives you many more recording options and a very nice suite of plug-ins to play with. I'm about to add Logic Pro to a couple of my systems.

If you want to record your whole band at once then you'll need a multichannel audio interface. One of the Firewire ones would make the most sense.

Okay...again apologizing for my lack of knowledge...would all the instruments have to somehow plug into this? Are these kinda expensive devices?

See, my bandmate has an mp3 recorder she uses to record practices. It just has a little microphone that picks up the noise we're making pretty well. The quality is not pretty but that's okay. We basically just use the recordings to work on new songs. (However, she does not have a computer at home and it's getting to be an issue for her to burn the cds from the mp3 recording at her office.)

M-Audio just released a new gizmo specifically for GarageBand.

Yes, you'd need some microphones to plug into the interface, but you'll do all of the mixing inside the box. The interfaces start at around $300 and go up from there. The Digidesign 002 Rack that I mentioned goes for around $1300.

Okay...again apologizing for my lack of knowledge...would all the instruments have to somehow plug into this? Are these kinda expensive devices?

See, my bandmate has an mp3 recorder she uses to record practices. It just has a little microphone that picks up the noise we're making pretty well. The quality is not pretty but that's okay.

Well, if you just want to continue to record your band with a single microphone, then you just need a cheap single channel input device. But there are many advantages to giving each instrument and singer its/their own microphone, etc, and record multiple tracks at once. Then you'd need the thingie ND is talking about.

If you're happy with the mp3 recorder, then plugging in a decent mic and using that to record in garageband (or any sound recording program) would work. The nice thing about the multi-track things is you can put each instrument on its own track and listen to them one-by-one or in different combinations, which you might like a lot.