<Bleep>ing GarageBand! Apple Computer today announced the availability of Bleeper, a free innovative Audio Units plug-in for use with Apple's entry-level digital music program, GarageBand. In a technological first for a plug-in designed for a music-creation program, Bleeper integrates with Mac OS X's built-in Speech Recognition technology to detect and "bleep" potentially profane or obscene language in speech or singing in real time. Bleeper can be applied either to existing audio tracks (to create "radio mixes" of your GarageBand songs) or to vocals being recorded in real time (so parents and teachers don't have to worry about children creating potentially offensive material with GarageBand). You can even apply Bleeper to instrumental tracks, although the results can be a little unpredictable. Bleeper itself is highly configurable, enabling music creators to insert silence, a wide variety of substitution tones, or even vanity noises whenever Bleeper detects a potentially offensive word. In another first, Bleeper can be installed and configured for all users by entering a Mac OS X administrator login: that is, a parent or teacher can install Bleeper and require that GarageBand use it for all vocal tracks. Mac OS X users without administrator privileges can configure Bleeper in their songs, but not disable it. The English language version of Bleeper is available now as a 4.1 MB download via Software Update; Apple anticipates localized versions of Bleeper will be available in coming weeks. [GD]

<http://www.apple.com/ilife/garageband/>
<http://db.tidbits.com/article/07500>