The world's largest music print publisher, Hal Leonard Corporation has released TrackPak, a new software series specially designed for use with Apple's popular GarageBand recording software.

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Four titles featuring top songs will be available at Macworld.

Users can pop TrackPaks into their Mac and instantly have 12 hit songs orchestrated out and ready to drop into GarageBand. They can then manipulate the tracks in any way they wish, such as removing the part for their instrument so they can jam along with the song. They can remix and modify any or all of the tracks, and use them as a springboard to create their own music.

"GarageBand has opened up an entirely new world to consumers and aspiring professionals wanting to create their own music," explained Doug Lady, Hal Leonard Vice President of Sales. "We're really excited to deliver this innovative new series of popular hit songs for learning and jamming along with inside GarageBand. Our access to a vast library of print rights lets Mac users have lots of fun remixing or playing along with their favorite songs."

"GarageBand presents unique opportunities for developers in creating plug- ins and content such as Apple Loops for an extremely large GarageBand fan base," said Ron Okamoto, Apple's vice president of Worldwide Developer Relations. "Hal Leonard has taken a unique approach with their TrackPak series for GarageBand, by providing Apple Loop-compatible content that is both educational and fun. We look forward to seeing more great titles from Hal Leonard in the future!"

Part of Apple's iLife suite of applications, GarageBand is a digital recording program that comes standard on all iMac computers. GarageBand turns a Mac into a recording studio packed with hundreds of instruments, pre- recorded loops, amps, effects, editing tools and even virtual recording engineers to assist in production. The program lets anyone -- from novice to pro -- create, perform and record music.

TrackPak titles feature software plus a songbook with sheet music notation for reference. This highly anticipated product includes loops for complete songs ("projects" in the GarageBand vernacular), plus individual beats, grooves, loops and riffs for all of the instruments in each song.

Latest news on Apple's GarageBand 2 can be found here.  

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