Garage Band

This isnt really a problem. Just wondering if someone knew a PC version of MACs Garage Band...

 

http://www.jakeludington.com/ask_jake/20050401_garageband_for_windows_xp.html

There are several solutions for creating loop-based music from Windows XP. Sony Acid Pro, Adobe Audition, Propellerhead Reason, Steinberg Cubase and Cakewalk Project 5 are among the pro solutions for composing with loops. Steinberg offers the Cubase SE entry level product for $99. Cakewalk Kinetic is priced around $70. One other app, which I haven't personally tried is Sony Acid Music Studio, which purports to be a light version of Acid Pro, which may mean it's confusing to use. The one thing all these solutions lack is ease of use, especially when compared against the bar set by GarageBand. Each of the Windows applications presented here requires some level of familiarity with the interface before you can begin effectively creating music. Apple managed to pull off making GarageBand drag-and-drop simple in the creative process.

Since GarageBand is the benchmark here, I'm only mentioning the pro solutions as something your daughter may want to graduate to if she's serious about making music. If you want to create music in a variety of styles, look to Cubase SE to provide the structure for building loop-based music across numerous tracks. From my own experience, Cubase is not the most intuitive interface to learn and your daughter may find herself fumbling until she learns the various quirks. On the other hand, if she takes the time to learn it, she could fairly readily graduate to using the full version of Cubase.

From a simplicity standpoint, Kinetic does the best job of making it easy to create something with the minimum of time invested in learning how to use the software. Kinetic is quite powerful under the hood and capable of providing some sophisticated edits to existing audio samples, but doesn't require much knowledge to get started. By browsing through the instrument list, selecting styles and instrument types and gradually layering up to 16 different instrument voices, Kinetic builds tracks fairly quickly. Created songs may be exported for use as WAV files in other projects or as MP3s if you upgrade to the MP3 export tool for Kinetic.

I typically use Adobe Audition when I want to build tracks from loops, because it's the audio interface I use for most of my recording projects. It remains familiar too me as someone who was a big fan of CoolEdit before Adobe bought the software from Syntrillium Software. Audition ships with a massive loop library that probably dwarfs the one available for GarageBand, although I haven't done a direct comparison. Audition also makes it easy to use virtually any audio file as a loop, which is a feature common to apps like Acid, Reason, and Cubase as well.

More recently, as I've spent some time with Kinetic, I'm finding it to be the fastest solution for building music beds on Windows XP. The interface includes an easy-to-navigate loop browser that makes finding the right sounds fairly similar to the process in GarageBand. If Cakewalk were to take Kinetic one step further and add visual icons identifying instruments as you browse the interface, similar to what is available in the GarageBand interface, I think they'd win more customers.

To wrap up this rather lengthy answer to what seemed like a simple enough question; there isn't anything for Windows XP users mapping directly to Apple's GarageBand. There are some very powerful solutions that do considerably more than what GarageBand can do, while sacrificing the user friendly nature of the GarageBand user experience. There are a few apps that come close, most notably Cakewalk Kinetic which offers what I consider to be the easiest Windows solution for creating music from audio loops.