iPod as musical instrument

October 26, 2010 10:43 AM

How do I play my iPod instruments into Garageband?

So iPod has all these little instruments on it. I want to start using them in recordings I make and mix in Garageband. If I just plug the iPod in, will it show up in Garageband (I haven't tried this yet)? Do I need to select something to get it to show? Do I need a special connector? IS IT EVEN POSSIBLE EVEN?

posted by Astro Zombie to technology (7 answers total)

Well, it depends on what you're talking about -- do you mean the toy instruments like the Ocarina, or midi controllers? The midi controllers will show up as midi controllers in whatever sound application you use, and the documentation will tell you how to set that up. The toy instruments won't work, though, as far as I know.
posted by empath at 10:48 AM on October 26, 2010

Also, you can always plug the headphone jack of your ipod into the microphone jack of your mac, but I think that wasn't what you were asking.
posted by empath at 10:49 AM on October 26, 2010

Can't you just take a line out from the headphone jack and record them as audio tracks like you would with any other audio signal?
posted by The World Famous at 10:50 AM on October 26, 2010

It's worth trying. Anybody do this already?
posted by Astro Zombie at 11:01 AM on October 26, 2010

I've done it with phone voice memos and voicemail recording with Pro Tools via the headphone jack. It worked great.
posted by The World Famous at 11:15 AM on October 26, 2010

Can't you just take a line out from the headphone jack and record them as audio tracks like you would with any other audio signal?

Yeah, that should work fine if you just want to capture the audio coming out. Monitoring it while you record would come down to whatever monitoring functionality Garageband provides—I record through an external M-Audio sound device so I use the monitoring native to that.
posted by cortex at 11:23 AM on October 26, 2010

Garageband's monitoring actually isn't terrible. Probably not zero-latency like a recording interface, but usable all the same.

Another option would be to get a headphone splitter, plug your iPod into that, run one output to the line-in on your computer and the other output to speakers or headphones for monitoring purposes.
posted by DMan at 4:34 PM on October 26, 2010