You can import your Band-in-a-Box compositions into GarageBand for fine-tuning, or to play them with the GarageBand software instruments. GarageBand Version 2 (and higher) support the direct import of MIDI files. Click on the .MID button to save your Band-in-a-Box song as a MIDI file, then open GarageBand and import the MIDI file by dragging it from the Finder into the GarageBand timeline. The MIDI file will appear in GarageBand with each instrument on a separate track. The tracks will play using the MIDI software instruments included with GarageBand. You can select a different instrument from the Track Info window (select the track and press Command+I).

Since GarageBand version 1 cannot import MIDI files directly, there are a few extra steps you need to go through to get your Band-in-a-Box song into GarageBand. These steps are described in the following tutorial.

Band-in-a-Box for Macintosh can now be supercharged with the introduction of the new program "GarageBand" for Mac OSX. You can take any Band-in-a-Box song, and with a few simple steps, import that song into GarageBand so that you can utilize its stunning sounds and effects. The following tutorial with show you just how easy this is by taking you through all of the necessary steps.

To follow this tutorial, you will need either the Pro or MegaPAK version of Band-in-a-Box, you will need GarageBand, and you will need a program called Dent-du-MIDI, which is available at http://homepage.mac.com/beryrinaldo/ddm/.

The first thing you need to do is create a song in Band-in-a-Box. Get it sounding the way you want with levels, tempo and patches. For this tutorial, we will use the AltRock1.sty demo (available with Styles Set 32) titled "Strange Cows". Once you have your song sounding the way you want it, you need to take note of the meter, the key, the tempo, and what instruments (patches) are utilized for the various Band-in-a-Box parts. The meter of this particular song is 4:4, the key is E, and the tempo is 170. For the instruments, the bass patch is "Fender Bass", the Piano part is not a piano at all, but is a distorted guitar, the drums patch is a standard rock kit, the Guitar part is an acoustic guitar sound, the Melody patch is a "Charang", which is has a similar sound to the distorted guitar. The Strings patch is "Echo Sweep", which is a synth strings sound. The GarageBand sounds are different from the standard General MIDI patches that you find in Band-in-a-Box, so the point is to try and listen to what the instruments sound like rather than simply focus on the names of the patches.

Next, you will need to raise the bass an octave. The process of bringing this file into GarageBand will result in a bass that is an octave too low unless you follow this step. Go to the "M" menu, and select "MIDI Settings". The "Octave" column will be at -1, but you should change this to 0. Just remember to change it back to -1 when this process is finished, otherwise your songs will sound strange when played in Band-in-a-Box.

The final step you need to complete in Band-in-a-Box is to save your song as a MIDI file. To do this, simply press the ".MID" button on the main Band-in-a-Box screen. Save your song as "File On Disk", and then choose a location. A handy place to save would be the desktop, but you can save it wherever you like.

You can now close Band-in-a-Box (but remember to change the bass octave back to -1 before you do!) and open the Dent-du-MIDI application. Dent-du-MIDI will convert the MIDI file into AIFF files which can be imported into GarageBand. Simply drag the MIDI file that you saved onto the picture of a mountain in Dent-du-MIDI, and drop it.

A folder will be created in the same location as the MIDI file, with "-GB" appended to it. In our case, the folder is located on the desktop, and it is named '"Strange Cows" - AltRock1.st.MID-GB'. If you open that folder, you will see that there are separate .aif files for each track, or part, of the original Band-in-a-Box song.

It is now time to load these files into GarageBand. First, you need to open GarageBand and create a new song. Now you will need to recall some of the information that you noted in Band-in-a-Box, namely the meter, key and tempo. In this example, you will recall, the meter is 4:4, the key is E, and the tempo is 170. You can also enter the title here. When you have entered this information, press "Create".

When the main GarageBand window appears, you are ready to import your files. You can do this in the same way as with Dent-du-MIDI. Simply highlight the .aif files in the folder, and drag them to the empty portion of the "Tracks" column in GarageBand, and drop them. The individual .aif files will each become its own track.

The next step is to pick the instrument patches for the individual parts. To do this, simply double-click on the track in question under the "Tracks" column. You can then make your instrument choice in the proceeding dialog box.

Some of the choices will be rather easy. In our example, we will pick "Rock Kit" for the drum part, "Fingerstyle Electric Bass" for the bass part, and "Steel String Acoustic" for the guitar part. For others, you need to recall the patches, and more specifically the sounds that were played in Band-in-a-Box, and find a close match from the list of GarageBand instruments. As you recall, the Piano part in Band-in-a-Box utilized the "Distorted Guitar" patch, so in GarageBand we will pick "Big Electric Lead". The Melody also had a sound that was similar to a distorted guitar, so we will pick the same "Big Electric Lead" patch for that part. For the "Strings" part, we listened to the part trying many of the different synth sounds available, and finally picked "Cheerful Trance". This is where some creativity comes into play. You can listen to these parts with any combination of instruments, and pick the ones you like the best. A final step would be to listen to all of the instruments together and mix the levels. If a track is too loud, you can lower the volume for that track. To perminently alter the levels for a track, click the small downward-pointing arrow on that track to open the "Track Volume" display. Put a check in the "Track Volume" box, and then click and drag the green dot below the track in question to where you want the level to be.

You can also use this display to change the level of an instrument at a section in the middle of the song. In our example, the "Strings" part was too loud, so we lowered the level by about 50%.

The final step is to convert this GarageBand file to an audio file. To do this, go to the "File" menu, and select "Export to iTunes".

This will automatically convert your song to a single aiff file which can then be either burned to an audio CD, or converted to MP3 to be shared with friends over the internet!