Apple's Upgraded iLife Has Benefits, but It's No Bargain

The next most significant upgrade in iLife '06 comes in GarageBand. This music-mixing program's new podcast studio lets you produce your own podcasts, including sound effects, background music and artwork, then publish them online (with a .Mac account) in just a few clicks. You don't even need a special microphone -- the one built into a new iMac sounded fine. But you do need to learn the vocabulary and grammar of GarageBand's complex interface.

The video half of iLife -- iMovie HD, which edits video footage, and iDVD, which creates DVDs of your iMovies and iPhoto albums -- didn't change much in last year's release and doesn't advance much this year, either. The new iMovie '06 can create video podcasts, apply some Hollywood-grade visual effects and open multiple projects at once.

But it's also picked up stability issues in this release. IMovie HD crashed several times on one of the new Intel-powered iMacs and also exhibited bizarre but ultimately harmless visual glitches, such as when video being copied from a camcorder appeared in a ghostly, see-through shade of blue -- but looked fine in editing and afterward.

IDVD can now produce widescreen-formatted DVDs and includes a fresh set of Apple's beautiful DVD-menu themes. Busy videographers can use a "Magic iDVD" command to have the program automatically cook up a DVD for them. But the real draw here is iDVD's new support for non-Apple DVD burners; if you've added one to your Mac, iDVD won't ignore that hardware anymore.

The basic promise of iLife remains intact in this version: It lets you turn a hopelessly confused set of photos, video clips and words into creations -- photo books, blogs, Web pages, podcasts, home movies -- that have people saying "You really made that? Wow." These are the programs that most other developers try and fail to match; a Windows refugee who buys a new Mac and starts discovering iLife '06 will probably be delighted.

But if you've already paid for iLife '05 and don't have a hankering for podcasting or blogging, you should think hard about jumping on this year's release.

The new version of iPhoto provides real benefits, but you can't buy that separately from the rest of the suite. Meanwhile, Apple doesn't offer any discount to buyers of older versions (only people who bought a new Mac Jan. 10 or later are eligible for a cheap $10 upgrade). And the company isn't cutting any breaks for subscribers to .Mac, even though much of iLife '06 doubles as an ad for its service.

Instead of upgrading to iLife '06, you could add a few cheap shareware or freeware media programs to fill in the blanks of older versions of iLife -- for instance, iPhoto utilities can split up a too-large iPhoto library, speeding up that program's performance, while non-Apple Web editors offer far more design creativity than iWeb.

Or you could just wait until the inevitable iLife '07 arrives.

Living with technology, or trying to? E-mail Rob Pegoraro atrob@twp.com.