Tips, tricks, Q&A, discussion for anyone recording banjo & acoustic instruments using Apple's GarageBand

32 Members, Created 11/16/2012 -

Administrators: MrNatch3L (owner)

GarageBand can silently destroy your work

From MrNatch3L on 11/16/2012 4:44:32 AM

I hate to start off with something negative, but this is important. I have had horrible problems with GB erasing all the recorded real instrument track data silently with no warning whatsoever. Nobody on the Apple support and other forums I consulted knew why. I even paid for an Apple support consultation and they were clueless about the cause.

I did get a clue how to stop it once it starts happening. You need to use Finder to go into your user profile, then to Library > Preferences and send com.apple.garageband.plist to Trash (GB should be closed when you do this).

The data I'm talking about here is inside the GB .band file, which is a package. In Finder, right-click on the project (e.g. MySong.band), choose Show Package Contents. Navigate into the Media folder. GB creates an  AIF file for each one of your real instrument tracks and stores them in this folder. The filenames correspond to the track names in GB. These files are what GB can wipe out, costing you hours, even DAYS worth of work. They are not moved to Trash. When they're gone, they're gone. When they're gone, you won't see any wave form in the tracks when you open GB.

I have never been able to tell whether the wipe happens when you close GB or when you open it, or if can be either. Seems to have happened to me both ways.

So the take-away here is RELIGIOUSLY BACK UP YOUR STUFF. I have a 1 TB external drive and when I finish a recording session, before I close GB, I copy the saved .band file to my drive.

If I open a song and find my tracks wiped:

1. Close GB
2. Delete the .plist file as described above
3. Send the bad .band package to Trash
4. Copy the .band package from backup drive to project folder
5. Open GB

So far that works every time, knock-knock.

One more clue from a recording engineer I know who said he heard about someone who had a similar experience after having the computer shut down when the battery ran out while GB was open and writing to the disk. That did in fact happen to me once, when my power went off during the day and I didn't notice. But it only happened once, and this keeps happening to me seemingly at random. I may go for weeks or months, then suddenly, WHAM.

Anyway, know ye that this very nasty bug is in there, it can make you a very unhappy camper, so do your back-up!

5 Comments
	cherbr says: 3/3/2013 5:59:43 AM I lost most of a whole song yesterday and can't figure out why. We had 5 tracks recorded and I saved it to my Dropbox so that another member of our band could record vocals remotely. When it was opened, it said that some of the track lengths were changed. Four of the tracks are gone but one remains. I saved in Garageband and in the Dropbox for backup. When I reopened it in Garageband, it said the same thing. Is this similar to what you were experiencing?
	MrNatch3L says: 3/3/2013 7:42:15 AM What a drag. Doesn't sound exactly like what I've experienced. I lost data with no message of any kind, and everything gone, no track lengths changed. I have never tried to share anything over the internet. I don't know anything about Dropbox or what it might be doing in terms of compressing and un-compressing data. If it's doing something like that, it could account for some data corruption. I know bits and bytes of files can sometimes get corrupted in transit. That's not usual, but it happens and that's why I don't use internet based backup services for anything I consider vital. "Local" storage is incredibly cheap these days.
	cherbr says: 3/4/2013 4:29:11 PM It sure is and boy did I learn my lesson. I do back up locally, but I sent it to the Dropbox before I backed it up. I Googled it and some people running Logic have had the same problem. Logic has the same guts under the hood as Garageband. Oh well, I re-recorded it and think it might be better than the one I lost. At least that's what I'm telling myself. :)
	MrNatch3L says: 3/5/2013 2:00:29 AM Real glad I decided not to drop the big buck for Logic. I wondered if the same nasty bug could be lurking in there too.
	cherbr says: 3/5/2013 6:19:34 AM No kidding! When it first happened, my husband suggested we upgrade to Logic. After finding out that the same problem exists there, we are holding off.
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