Oh, sorry, I didn't realize a source link was expected or required. Makes sense, of course. I couldn't find a posting guidelines sticky with anything relevant in it, but I was also having trouble using this forum til just now; I finally figured out posts and pages are backwards here (bottom to top and right to left). Interesting. Link has been added to original post.
Anyway, no I didn't use GarageBand. I used a program I wrote myself, which I made b/c I wasn't happy with or couldn't figure out how to use any of the commercial software. It's perfect for writing music from my point of view, but has no functionality beyond entering and manipulating notes, and sending MIDI to hardware for playback. I have never known how to do anything but use existing patches as-is, and would like to learn, but find it all extremely confusing and difficult. I tried a demo of GB a year or two ago and was completely overwhelmed; the interface made no sense, and it didn't even seem possible to enter notes manually. Still, I suppose this means I will have to save up for GB and try to figure out a workflow pipeline that'll work... which'll probably also mean writing LlamaWare's MIDI export code at long last, heh.
Thank you for your response... hopefully the details within will be meaningful and useful at some point.