Garageband's Learn to Play will run on a PPC... kind of

Debating the merits of PPC vs. MacIntel is a bit of a red herring with the latest GarageBand. A lot of people are missing the most egregious negative point about the latest version, that is:

It's barely got anything worth upgrading for.

Amp modeling and stomp boxes? Meh...better off doing it with a 3rd-party solutions.

Lessons? Many of us don't need 'em & don't want 'em; there are other, and—some would argue—better ways to learn.

What GarageBand REALLY needed is better control—numerical input on ALL controls (with arrow-key support); more keyboard shortcuts; the easy ability to change tempo mid-song; moving loops and tracks, start/end points along the timeline with more accuracy via arrow keys. Those are some of the big ones. There are lots of little things that could have made GarageBand worth the upgrade price.

Word is Apple was worried about cannibalizing their potential market for people who might want to upgrade to Logic Studio. My thought is that they should have provided a little better taste of what real production control is about. People who have only used GarageBand really don't have any idea how valuable that kind of control is...having some of it in G.B. would be a better enticement to upgrade to Logic.

No one mentioning that Norah Jones looks hot? Wait - this isn't Engadget :-)

It does not look like there is a TECHNICAL reason that prevents Garageband's Learn to Play from running on PPC machines.

It looks like Apple intentionally disabled it for business reasons. I guess Apple wants more people to go out and buy more Macs in these hard economic times. This is truly Shameful..

I can run the included learn to play lessons on my Core Solo Mac mini using the method described by Mac.Blorge.

try buying garageband-lessons via http://fheusel.de/garageband/

i made a little badape tapf, so it now will return true for DoesMentorMeetsMinimumSystemRequirements et voila... store workin, lessons workin :)

so yes, apple is playin the bad game

written on mobile device, so the vars name could differ minimally

ps: i heard of a tutorial floatin around already how to do this with onboard dev-tools only, so you may google it and test it yourself

In one sense I agree with the whole idea of PPC machines being able to run Intel software. Yes, they can do it, but it's like saying a Ford Escort can run the Indy 500. Go ahead and do it, I'm gonna go over here n' move on with life while you're waiting for the splash screen to come up. Remember the whole "Vista capable" argument? Same concept. If Apple said it could run on PPC machines they'd have a whole army of people crying about how slow it is on a PPC Mac and then one village idiot would dream up a bogus lawsuit over it. Great.

Apple started to move on in 2006. It's 2009.

Yeah coercing people to upgrade when the hardware still can run your software is pretty stupid. A software company should only drop support for older platforms only when it isn't feasible to support them anymore.

Apple encouraging people to upgrade because PPC machines are not able to run aspects of the software: perfectly reasonable. Apple disabling bits of their software, even though they'd run fine on PPC equipment, to force people to spend more money on new Macs: the height of douchebaggery. I don't know enough to say which is the case here, but it's suspicious. As an owner of a perfectly fine Powerbook G4, color me disgruntled.

I've got a dual G5, and iMovie works without having to resort to hex editing... is that only for certain processors?