Garage Band or Logic Express?

[Crete]

I've recently been moving all of the tracks that my band previously recorded on our Korg d3200 to garage band and I've been really impressed with how easy it is to do editing and make the tracks sound better, and I'm impressed with the results I've had just fiddling around with it. I was planning on getting started with computer recording since I'll be in college next year and don't want to bring our big 32 track recorder with me and my real question is, what kind of things will I be able to achieve with logic express that I wouldn't have in garage band? What will my $200 dollars be paying for that I don't have already, I know that there are things but I'm just not sure whether it would be worth it for me right now.

It might be useful to know that I don't think I'll need more than two tracks recording on it at once because we'll still be doing most of our bands recordings on the Korg and then transferring them to the computer, so all I'll be doing with it on its own is one or two tracks at a time.

[Strangedogs]

Logic Express - it's Garageband and a whole lot more. I use Logic Studio 8 and Express is basically almost the same - it's amazing. Garageband is great but LOGIC is Amazing.

[sparqee]

I've heard several people tell me that Logic Express is far more CPU efficient than GarageBand which I believe since my experience with GarageBand is that it's a resource hungry app. If you do a Google search on "logic express" garageband comparison you'll find several forum discussions on the topic. Some old, some new. I've not used Logic Express but I did have occasion to spend 40-50 hours on Logic Pro a few months back and it's pretty darned cool. People say that Logic Express 8 is a very capable version with just a few limitations when compared to the Pro version.

The first serious advantage I see Logic Express having over GarageBand is automation. If you're doing mostly midi tracks you can work around not having automation in GarageBand but doing mixdowns of "real instrument" tracks without automation is limiting or at the very least time consuming.

So to sum up; I would say GarageBand is great for writing, and capturing live takes that don't need a lot of editing or mixing. If you're doing multi-track overdubs then Logic Express will give you the additional power to better manipulate your recorded tracks.