It's iLife Day! It's iLife Day! iLife '04 officially became available today, and now Mac users all over the world are blissfully experiencing the unprecedented thrill of scrolling through more than two dozen digital photos without lag time. They're re-editing all of their home movies to add that scrolling Star Wars text at the beginning. They're wondering how much more money they can charge for their homemade porn DVDs now that they can wedge an extra half-hour of smut on each one. They're looking at iTunes and realizing that it's the same thing they already had.

But most of all, they're looking at the new new stuff. Loops. Software instruments. Virtual guitar amps. Let's face it: most people shelling out 49 clams on the first day of availability aren't buying iLife for the ability to play more than one song during a slideshow; this is the stuff the preorderers were really jonesing for. So, above all else, everyone's getting down and funky with their bad selves via the musical magic of GarageBand.

Sorry, did we say "everyone" was getting down and funky? We should have said "everyone but faithful viewer David Green," because despite the fact that MacNN reported that some readers had received "confirmation of shipment of iLife '04" as of Wednesday morning, poor ol' Dave got some email from Apple last night informing him of an "unexpected supply delay." As a result, his preordered copy of iLife "will now ship on or before 01/21/2004," so unfortunately he's going to have to sit out the global iLife Day celebration. But at least he's not alone; according to MacFixIt, another customer named Bobby Sussman also had his iLife order bumped back to the 24th. We have no idea what caused the delay (the Apple Store Cambridgeside had about eleventy-twelveteen copies on the shelves today), but maybe Bobby and David can pass the time by playing Connect Four until their software arrives. "Pretty sneaky, sis!"

Or maybe they should prep themselves by scoping out some of the first GarageBand reviews floating around out there. So far most of them are pretty favorable; Jon Fortt of the Mercury News writes that GarageBand is a "powerful tool" that "might break new ground in how simple it makes the process" of scraping together your own music. Writing for The Mac Observer, Bob Levitus walks us through his first night with the software as he slaps together his first song, and calls GarageBand "one of the best computing experiences [he's] had" in over 17 years with the Mac. In the New York Times, David Pogue (being an actual music guy dontcha know) offers some good specific criticism of the 1.0 release while affirming that GarageBand is an "exciting breakthrough" that could catapult unknowns to stardom. (Incidentally, both Fortt and Levitus had the guts to post their first GarageBand-produced songs with their reviews. Something tells us we're going to see a lot of that sort of thing pretty soon.)

As for us? Well, we didn't want to risk any "unexpected supply delays," so we picked up our Family Pack at Cambridgeside today. Of course, we haven't actually had any time to do anything so crazy as install it yet, but when we do, we'll let you know what we think. In the meantime, our iLife Day celebration consisted of stroking the box and saying "Ooooooooo." Oh, and Connect Four. Lots of Connect Four.