At first I hestitated to upgrade from iLife '04. Like most people, I am only willing to spend the money on upgrades if I can see a notable need, or significant new features. I eventually sprung for it, using my student discount, and I'm glad I did.

The thing I find funny about a lot of the other reviews I see, is that the reviewers think that this is a professional product or at least review it like it is. Why? Nobody, especially not Apple, is claiming it to be so. It is, without a doubt, is an excellent product for its class, which is a suite of media tools for the novice to advanced amateur. I am a professional photographer, and I find myself using iPhoto nearly every day. iPhoto is an excellent image manager. One of the greatest new features is the ability to handle RAW files. Other nice features are the automatic card recognition, downloading, and organizing. The program has nice editing features, they are quick and easy to get to (what I call 'down and dirty'). A very nice feature is the ability to set what happens when you double click on a photo, you can aither go to the editor, open the iPhoto editor in another window, or pick an editing program of your choice- like Photoshop Elements, or my favorite Photoshop CS2, or any other program you may want to use. You also still have the ability to get to iPhoto's editor with a button at the bottom of the screen. IPhoto makes outputting your images super easy, you can email, post on the net, print, make and order books, export files, and set wallpapers and screen savers. I use the program as my main photo organizer, finding it much easier to deal with than Photoshop, or even the Adobe Bridge.

In the military, I am a videograoher, which I guess makes me Pro in that field, and I can say that Apple products far exceed the competition. We use Avid, and it absolutely sucks. It is the most counter-intuitive program, buggy, and chock full of inane error meassages that invarialby pop up on every operation. The answer is Final Cut, a fantastically easy and powerful program. But if you don't need a professional editor, than I can reccommend iMovie and iDVD. On a recent mission, we needed to cut a few DVDs, and the solution was not to use the Dells with the horrendous PC software, but to use my Powerbook and iMovie and iDVD. We banged out a nice product in no time using our finished stories from Avid. So, whereas I would never had bought these products individually, I am sure glad I had them as part of the iLife Suite.

GarageBand is also a very nice little program that I like to play with, music being a great interest of mine, though just for fun. I find GarageBand to be supercool, and all I need and more, and as usual, very easy to use.

One fo the best things about the product is that it is from Apple, running on an Apple operating system, running on an Apple computer, so compatibility is never an issue, and the Apple quality and ease of use runs throughout. Whenever Apple upgrades the OS, it immediately upgrades the iLife program if needed.

I highly recommend this product, either as a first purchase or as an upgrade, you won't be disappointed.

All works great except iMovie HD. If you try timeline editing it seems to leave some invisible footage at the end of your video. Makes editing small clips or small videos very difficult. The invisible footage does not get exported but it just feels more flaky than a fully updated iMovie 4 (as long as you remember to SAVE PROJECT before emptying trash).

Would only buy for the new iDVD, so if you don't have a superdrive, iLife5.0 will be a waste of money as iPhoto will be your only useable app.

Great new features in iPhoto andd iMovie HD. Nice new themes in iDVD.

We upgraded our old iLife (`04) to `05 primarily because of the new version's ability to deal with wide screen dv. Everything is just as simple as before - there are no surprises. Garageband seems like a powerful application, but nothing that is essential to our life. iPhoto is a solid upgrade that has better editiing tools - if a bit cryptic for newcomers to video editing. I would suggest adding features like the old Metacreations Photosoap; of course that would infringe on Photoshop's area and that isn't likely to happen. I expect iDVD to be every bit as good as the previous version, though I haven't had a chance to use it yet.

All in all this is a solid upgrade. I recommend it for anyone with a newer (any G5 with DVD player) Power Mac, a digital camera, and a dv recorder.

Everything is fine. If you have Tiger, you dont need iLife as it comes with it. I bought it for the easy operation for iPhoto.

I purchased iLife 05 since it was touted as a major advance over iLife 04. I really wanted only iPhoto but the rest came with it. I found that there is an improvement in the editing capability in iPhoto 05. IPhoto is an excellent program for photo processing but the advances in 05 over 04 are really not worth the $70.00.

I purchased iLife '05 to accompany another upgrade I bought for my 2003 Powerbook G4, the Mac operating system 10.4 (Tiger). While it doesn't require Tiger and runs well on Panther (10.3), iLife '05 is important software for most Mac users, and the upgrade is worth it for the new features (HD content in iMovie, notation in Garageband, new themes in iDVD, the speed of iPhoto - which can now keep track of camera videos). But I did discover that there were a few bugs, although it seems Apple is doing their best to remedy them with consistent updates, which are automatically downloaded from Apple if your Apple is online (sometimes over 50MB need to be downloaded).

iMovie HD is less stable with my collection of older DV cameras, and switching between camera import and the clip editing screens frequently caused iMovie HD to crash while my camera was connected. Also, while iMovie HD may be able to recognize widescreen video from some DV cameras, it certainly isn't for all cameras, especially older models. But this really is a gem of a video program and there's nothing easier to use.

The latest version of iTunes continues to be free, but there's no doubt that it's integral to the rest of the software of iLife: iMovie HD, iDVD, and Garageband can all import easily from your iTunes music library, which makes it essential for quickly adding in specific songs (or exporting new ones from Garageband) with your music collection. And the Podcast automation is terrific, and it's easy to browse for new content servers, which opened my eyes to the breadth of podcasters. I believe some people take issue with how Apple expects Podcast MP3's to be tagged on the podcasters website, and hopefully Apple will adopt a more standardized way in the future.

As for iPhoto, even though it doesn't have true RAW file editing support, the editing abilities for your photos are now much more robust (exposure, temperature, tilt, and more), and it seems much more light on its feet (speedier) than previous versions. iDVD is equally nimble and the animated themes keep getting better and better.

On the whole, a necessary progression, and Apple has proven that they will continue to tweak and upgrade its potential. Even with a few little bugs, it's well worth the money!

iLife is superb; my only complaint is that it doesn't include a Version 5 of iTunes, but after installation one can upgrade to 4.9 in the usual Apple way. So far everything works great with Tiger (OS 10.4.2) in my 1 GHz G4 Powerbook with 256 MB DDR SDRAM without snap, crackle, or pop. That amount of RAM is the least I would recommend for Tiger and iLife use, however; otherwise the constant swapping in and out of virtual memory will drive you nuts if it works at all. As it is this amount feels marginal to me and an upgrade is on the way.

Worth it. Only $70 for 5 wonderful tools.
iPhoto is superb. Using iDvd I created some spectacular Photo DVD's. iMovie is good but I use Final Cut Express.
GarageBand is one I haven't used much.
iTunes I use quite a bit. Very powerful.

To all you Windows/Linux users I have this to say -- Hahaha.

I found that as usual with new software, you gain some and lose some. I purchased
ilife so I could export edited music from imovie and use it elsewhere. It took a few days to figure it out but it does work. I am enjoying a few other perks of ilife as well. It will print jewel case covers for you cd's with ease. Overall I am very happy.

I'm sure this is a nice suite of programs from Apple. I love my Mac but cannot install the full program on my (now) puny 400 MHz G3 iMac - the slowest system it can work on. It requires 4.67GB on your startup disk. That's half of my almost full harddrive! And the installer won't allow it to be installed on an external drive. I've got lots of space there! Must be on startup disk. Dang.... GarageBand also doesn't work on a G3 system like mine. iPhoto 5 on a G3 system leaves off the advanced editing tools. So, be very careful about ordering this. Read the fine print about system requirements. I am very disappointed. Oh well, it's almost time to buy that G5 iMac with the 20" lcd.

iLife '05 is nice, and especially so for somebody like me who is coming from the original iLife. However, I am not sure that any of its improvements would be worth $80 from iLife '04.

All I wanted to do was create a DVD for my brother. IMovie is decent. It has a few minor quirks to it. The amount of time for title slides has a max of 4 seconds. All of my slides are 4 seconds. Anything else seems too short and amateurish. It had a problem importing MGEP 1 movies. I had to go through a convoluted process to get the movie into place. Even then, the first .5 seconds of the audio was missing... due to the conversion process. This is not Apple fault, except they should be able to import those movies. all other formats works fine.

I found iDVD to have major quirks. First, the audio was 1 second behind the video on the DVD. Then the audio kept advancing forward, make it ouf of sync, more and more as the movie played on. Then the movie would stop the audio at the first sound effect i placed in a text slide. This was extremely frustrating. I thought it was supposed to be easy!?

iDVD just takes a movie, renders it, and burns it to a DVD with some selection screens. How hard is that? I ended up remaking one of my iMovie projects three time before it finally came out. The other project, well, I had to extract the audio so that it would be on the DVD (except the first and last video). Lastly, the final chapter (movie marker) pointed to the start of the movie.

I like Garageband, it's easy but not a powerful tool like Logic.
ITunes, well, it's iTunes! It is definitive.
iPhoto is awesome. It still feels like it is just feature creeping, for better or worse.

iLife '05 is supposed to support RAW image processing (see product description above) for photos in iPhoto. The surprise is that although my Canon camera is supported, it's RAW image format is not, rendering iPhoto useless for most of my photographs. This was unexpected as third party companies have image conversion software that manages to do this with little problem. I know there are many RAW image formats, but it's the job of good technology to simplify a complex environment.

I'm new to Apple products and very pleased overall since we purchased the imac G5. It seems like in most cases "it just works" describes their system well, but in this case, I guess we needed to read the "fine print".

I also noticed that it is still not possible to record anything on GarageBand with the iSight's (Apples webcam/microphone). Apparently there is some type of software/hardware incompatibility. Expected in Windows machines, (fortunately) unusual in Apple products. Not a major issue for most, but the incompatibility of Apple hardware and software is still an unwelcome surprise.

All of the improvements are great. I was editing a video for a presentation when my order arrived. There was a transition that I simply could not get the old iMovie to do. I installed the new iLife and told it to make the same transition in the film and it worked perfectly. I don't know why or how but I was sold five minutes after the box arrived.
I still think iPhoto is the best improvement however. I really like the scrollable photo index when looking at a picture in edit mode. I also like the ability to eject the camera from within iPhoto(I sometimes forgot to do this before.) And the one-touch red-eye correction is nice too.
Also I like the new themes for iDVD. The movie I was editing ended up getting one of the new themes instead of the old theme I had originally picked and I was very pleased with the end result. The presentation was a big success.

I have used both Mac and PC computers. I have also used software written for both. There is nothing easier or more intuitive than Apple iLife and '05 is a genuine improvement over '04. You would have to buy several software programs at $400-$600 each to do what iLife can but they will never match iLife or ease, simplicity, and intergration. It doesn't take a lot of computer savvy to maximize iLife and it does most of the work for you - and now even more quickly than ever. Other softwares we have used for loading pictures are slow, hard to manage, and really a pain. If you are looking for a software that allows you to manage your pictures, make movies, post things on the internet, and be able to access them, you will not find a more user-friendly program anywhere.

With iLife, you can edit your pictures. You can order copies with just a click of a button. With just another click, you can e-mail them to anyone in your e-mail address book. Another click you can post them on a web-sight for your friends to see. In addition, you can set your pictures, web sights to your favorite music in iTunes and load them on your iPod and taken them anywhere.

Speaking of iTunes - . if you haven't discovered iTunes yet go to Apple's home page and check it out. iTunes makes it easier and more affordable to buy music. With iTunes you can buy entire albums or only the songs you want from a particular CD. Once down loaded, you can arrange them in any order you want, burn them on your own CD or hook your Mac to your home stereo and listen through you speakers. In addition, whatever music you have in iTunes is easily used in iPhoto, iDVD or the other applications iLife and is fully intergrated with iWork. You will not be disappointed with iLife unless you love to spend tons of money for three or four different software programs that will not work together as seamlessly as iLife.

I really cannot believe how much iLife does for such a small price. Read that sentence again because it would be a shame for you to miss that concept. I would pay $200 for Garageband alone. But for under half that price you actually get 5 elegant, easy to use apps. And you WILL use them once you start playing around. iLife is reason enough to buy a Mac.

iLife... it's hard to critique iLife because to me most of the applications are frivolous and fun and not much more... however, each shares a few common traits:

(caveat: I only use iPhoto, Garageband, and iTunes)
1) They are all very easy to use
2) They are all MUCH faster than previous versions
3) They are, relatively speaking, inexpensive

However, Tunes, awesome as it may be, is free to download on its own. Garageband is very cool... it allowed me to satisfy a mini-mid-life-crisis and drag the old electric bass out of the closet... but is it good for much else? iPhoto is cool - and well integrated with iWork (which I recommend highly, btw). In addition, iPhoto's book-making ability is better. Much better.

So, while I question why *I* own iLife, I have to say they are some top-notch applications. Why only 4 stars? Because GarageBand has faux wood. I mean, Faux wood? What were they thinking?

EDIT 1: After using iLife for a few months, I recently enjoyed some of the updates to iPhoto's book tools, which now allow you to actually build a photo album that prints on both sides and has much more fluid and intuitive photo editing (from within the book screens). Worthy of another half a star for that I think...

EDIT 2: I recently got tasked with creating a radio-show, and went to the Apple Store for advice on what to use for audio editing equipment and software. They looked at me like I had two heads and said "um... Garageband?" Sure enough, this app was able to do absolutely everything that I needed, such as record audio from a microphone or via a phone interview (although you do need some extra hardware for that), mix in background music and FX, and export the whole thing to an MP3. Its easy to create background music for ambience using the included loops (which are royalty free) which saved another headache. It was perhaps unfair to judge this application originally solely based upon its regrettable faux-wood exterior. To bad there's no way to change the star rating, because now that I've used Garageband and now how powerful it is, iLife definitely gets 5 stars from me. In fact, it's worth the price of admission on its own.

This is a great suite of software. Each component is best-in-class, and taken together, they constitute a real value for your money. I haven't used the iDVD component, but the others are very simple and intuitive to use. I'd used iPhoto and iTunes in earlier versions, and the changes to the latter are relatively minor (and a free download, if you don't want the whole package). The iPhoto changes are the ones that have been the most useful for me. I'm hoping to spend a bit more time with GarageBand soon, but a couple of the changes there are already appreciated, even though I'm very, very limited as a musician. It's just fun to play around with.

One other note - another reviewer has rated this one star because he or she couldn't install it on a computer running OS X 10.2. First of all, I'd say the reviewer seems to be unclear on the point of these reviews. Following his/her lead, I suppose I'd have to rate a lot of Windows software at one star, because I can't install it on my computer at home. And I have to wonder whether that reviewer, and the others with the same problem, saw that the latest version of iTunes will run on 10.2 and just extrapolated that to the idea that all of iLife will run on 10.2. Of course, I suppose it is possible that the website wasn't clear.

I have had this for 1 week now, great updates to all the programs,
iPhoto is fantastic along with the new books you can order, and
the new themes in iDVD are really cool. Like the other reviews
I don't use Garageband, so used the Custom Install and did not
bother to download that, no sense using harddisk space for a program
I don't use.

If you visit www.apple.com site, and go to SUPPORT, you can download Mac OS X Update 10.3.7 for free, it's been available since
12/15/04 and your ready to enjoy iLife 05 !

After watching Steve Jobs' Keynote presentation at the Macworld expo, I rushed to order my copy of iLife 05. I was excited at the new features in iPhoto, particularly being able to create folders to store albums and slideshows. The new iDVD themes also looked beautiful.

Before buying it, I carefully checked Apple's website for the system requirements - I'm still running OS 10.2.8, so I wanted to make sure it was compatible. Sure enough, it said "10.2.6 or later, 10.2.8 recommended". Amazon's tech specs say the same thing.
But alas, I get the package, read the side of the box, and what do I see?

System Requirements:
Mac OS v10.3.4
OS 10.3.6 required for HD and RAW

I immediately rechecked the Apple site, where it now read 10.3.4, or 10.3.6.
I was cursing my stupidity when I came across others who had the same problem - read the system requirements as 10.2.8 recommended, ordered it, and cannot use it. Others have called Apple's tech support on this and support has denied the website has ever listed 10.2.8 as a requirement.

Please beware, if you are still using any OS earlier than 10.3.4, this will not work!!!

I really would like to rate it higher, but I'd have to be able to use it first.

Edit to review 02/21/05:
After reading other reviews, I think there was a misconception about mine. Let me clarify:

I posted this review for a reason. For a short time, Apple's website listed the **wrong** system requirements for iLife 05. It had nothing to do with iTunes system requirements. After calling Apple, they acknowledged it was a mistake. I was told the system requirements for iLife 04 were "copied" to the iLife 05 page in the Apple Store. The wrong information was on Apple's site for less than 1 day before it was corrected. I just happened to come across it before it was changed.

**Amazon.com also had the wrong system requirements (listing 10.2.6 or later) listed for iLife05 until about two weeks ago.** Viewing the system requirements **now** shows the correct information.

I was trying to caution others running 10.2.x in purchasing this product based on incorrect information listed on this site at the time. Seems to me one of the points of a review is to provide information that may be useful to potential buyers of a product, not to discredit another review.

Apple's website was clear. Amazon's product specs were clear. They were, for a time, also **wrong**.

I thought iLife '04 was good, but this version is even better.

iPhoto now supports RAW images, which is all I ever shoot on my Canon 10D, so now iPhoto has all of my images cataloged in it. I also like that iPhoto will now catalog video clips. Most of the clips I have are just silly videos I have found out on the net, but now I have a better place to store them.

iDVD has some really beautiful themes! I just wish Apple had released '05 a few months ago - I could have really used some of the new themes when I was working on some video projects!

I am also glad to see widescreen hit iMovie. I don't do any HD stuff, but I do like to shoot in 16x9 mode. I do wish Apple had included some more goodies in iMovie with regards to transitions/effects/titles, but just having the upgrade to do widescreen is worth it to me.

Haven't and don't really intend on playing with Garage Band, so can't comment on it.

Apple's hardware is great but their software is even better. iLife '05 is a huge update with many improvements over the '04 version.

Big improvments have been made to iPhoto and iMovie. Garageband has some nice updates as well but I don't heavily use it so I can't really comment on it too much. iDVD has some really nice new themes, a lot nicer than last years.

If you don't own a Mac, this is the reason to buy one. Nothing like this package exists on the PC and the price just makes it even sweeter. It costs a bit more this year but they made many more improvments so it is worth it.

If you do own a Mac you owe it to yourself to pick this up. This is a great set of applications that goes unmatched.