Garage Band Rag

Having struggled with Audacity, imovie and a few other free sound and editing softwares for the last month, I'm still (I repeat STILL) working on a sound clip of about 7 minutes. Perhaps the problem is that I have worked with film and sound editing at a professional level and I'm expecting too much from both myself and the available software. I am accustomed to using FinalCutPro for film and sound editing. I'm a MAC user for those of you who don't know. Perhaps the inherent limitations (or just plain differences) of nonprofessional sound editing software is what's driving me crazy. Isn't there some sort of standard vocabulary?

I'm now working in Garage Band, at the suggestion of a classmate. The editing should be intuitive and industry standard, but, Garage Band seems to have its own vocabulary. In editing a marker is used to note a spot where editing is intended to occur. However, in GB a marker is something else and so far, I've not found the equivalent by another name. I've found this to be true with lots of other "tools." It's hard to do what I need because tools are called things other than the known, industry standard names or names that I, a basic level professional, have come to know as standard. And, there doesn't seem to be any easy way (that I've found) to translate; like maybe an old-fashioned glossary. Why?

At this point, I've finally figured out how to cut, join (no options for transition although GB does a great job of the match-up in joining clips), add audio clips and tracks and with the aid of a sweet little software called Switch, www.nch.com (purchased online for $28 after a 15 day trial period) I've converted my edited sound into an mp3 (Garage Band does not save as an mp3 which seems a bit mean-hearted on the part of the developers) ready to be uploaded by Hipcast, today. Now, if I can only master Hipcast. Wish me luck.