How to Add an Audio Unit in GarageBand

I was going to do a tutorial on this, but 'Crustibooga' on the MacIdol forums already did a great write-up on this. Adding Audio Units is a great way to expand the sounds and versatility of GarageBand. The tutorial uses the fun free synth BuZzer as an example, but you can use any Audio Unit in this way. One of my favorite Audio Units is Crystal:

Crystal is a semi-modular software synthesizer featuring both subtractive synthesis and frequency modulation (FM) synthesis. It offers abundant modulation control with over 90 parameters which may be modulated, multi-stage envelopes with graphical editors, extensive tempo sync of envelopes/LFOrates/delay times, built-in effects for chorus/flanging/comb filtering/echoes/reverb, and a band splitter for effects processing by frequency band. Not only that, Crystal has wave sequencing, granular synthesis, program morphing, MIDI learn, and imports soundfonts. The musical applications for Crystal are literally boundless.

Crystal is free, which is quite amazing for such a great sound engine. I barely scratched the surface of this app, but I already made some nice sounds. Of course there are plenty more Audio Units to find, both commercial and free. KVR is a good starting point to find more.

Comments

[cedric]

thanks for that
try this:
http://www.mediahussy.net/wordpress/2006/03/08/garageband-8-bit-plug-in/

[taylor]

i can't figure out how to get crystal to work with GB. i installed it and everything, but it just looks like an audio file, not a software instrument.