Reader Zach Paull is a GarageBand enthusiast who’s less than enthusiastic about the amount of hard drive space consumed by GarageBand’s loops. He writes:

I am a huge fan of GarageBand. I have been using it for a few years now, and have only one major gripe. I have purchased and installed four jam packs. This has taken up a large chunk of my hard drive space—nearly 17 gigs. I work on an iBook G4 which at its best has only 25 gigs of available space. I think with all the space that these packs take up, it is slowing my computer down when I run GarageBand on it. I know that with my iTunes Library, I can move it to an external hard drive, and that has been a big help. Is there any way that this can be done with these jam packs?

GarageBand '11: Upgrade your instruments for free I've been writing and playing music for a number of years and lately have been using Apple's GarageBand to capture my writing ideas. It's certainly not a fully fledged DAW, but I've found it to be more than adequate for getting an idea fleshed out to a demo quality recording. Garageband 11 Jam Packs Free Download Mp3 Virtual drummers representing specific genres automatically play along with your song, while simple controls let you fine‑tune their performance. Drummers can even listen to your riff and come up with the perfect complementary beat. Garageband Samples. Browse our collection of Garageband samples, sample packs, loops, one shot drums and sound effects. All Garageband samples are available to download 100% royalty free for use in your music production or sound design project. 686 downloads Apple GarageBand Jam Pack Updater will upgrade your version of GarageBand Jam Pack 1. MegaSynth 1.0 155 downloads MegaSynth is a set of GarageBand audio loops that offer classic machine attitude and style with a versatile set of synth effects, basslines and motif's for most cross-genre situations. I have downloaded (and installed) all the Garageband and Logic Pro libraries, plus a couple of Jam Packs. They all work well, but the Garageband instrument library tree it shows 15 categories, being the last one “Legacy Content” (or something like that, as my home language is Spanish), which splits in two (Logic and Garageband) and each one.

There is. By default, Apple’s loops are stored in two locations—/Library/Audio/Apple Loops and /Library/Application Support/GarageBand/Apple Loops. Dig down into these folders until you locate the folders that hold specific jam packs—Jam Pack 2 – Remix Tools and Jam Pack 4 – Symphony Orchestra, for example. Drag these jam pack folders to your external drive. Once copied, drag the original folders to the Desktop.

GarageBand will give no indication that it can’t find its loops until you try to use one of them. Then it will throw up a dialog box indicating it hasn’t a clue where they are and asks if you’d like to re-index your loops. Click Cancel.

Now locate the jam pack folders that you copied to your external drive and drag them into GarageBand’s loop browser. GarageBand will acknowledge that you’re attempting to add loops to the browser and ask if you’d like to keep the loops in their current location or copy them to the Loops folder. The correct answer is Current Location. Test your configuration by selecting one of the jam packs from the browser loops pop-up menu (the one that normally reads My Loops), choosing a sound, and previewing it. If GarageBand won’t play it and instead throws up that re-indexing dialog box, let GarageBand re-index the loops this time.

Jam Packs Garageband

Once you’re sure everything is working as it should, you can toss out the original loop folders that you moved to the Desktop.