Garage Band '08 crashing at startup

Well...seems I must temper my earlier enthusiasm. After getting through the aplhabet--and about 2000 fonts--I thought I found Quick Type Pi to be the offending party. But then Quorum light and then QUeen of Italy (when reintroduced) was keeping GB from launching.

Well after taking yesterday off I resumed my quest and just for yucks, I removed all fonts from the System folder and just put back in those three "bad" fonts. Guess what? GB started right up!

Now what?

alan b

Update... Thanks for the Fonts tip. Worked for me. I did have several variations on Helvetica Neue installed as well. Whew. I was about to call off planned upgrades to several computers. Still, hope they have updates that fix these odd issues...

J

Guess everyone is having the same issues,.. I just not even two hours ago just purchased iLife 08' everything runs fine except for garage band it will go threw intializing then just stops nothing else,.. I have tried the above mentioned fixes to no ovail.

Moving the entire font folder worked for me, so I guess It's just a matter of finding out exactly what font/s is causing the problem. Much thanks on this fix.

fwiw.

i tried all the same stuff...perms, caches, fonts, etc.

that got me to the point of successfully starting the app with a dialog saying that it wanted to know the correct path to a plugin, in this case fxpansions' bfd.

i searched bfd, and 86'd the .plist and associated files with it.

started right up.

for me it was a plugin conflict. all my other plugins worked correctly.

again, fwiw.

woooohoooo

so its 3.30 in the mornin and i put the fonts on the desktop. garageband is up and running at last.


Maybe garageband is the new font check application in disguise.

thank you thank you whoever thought up this one



mmm... my photoshop opened up first time too.. a rare thing recently. Or is that just becasue theres 5,000 less fonts it has to look at?

5000 font really will clog up your system!

I had the GB 08 problem, too. When I cleaned out the font folders down to the basic Tiger, iLife and Microsoft Office fonts.... all was well and GB launched OK.

I recommend buying a copy of "Taking Control of your Fonts" from TidBits and following the advice there. It's ten bucks well spent!

If you can, spend the time to organise your fonts and only activate them as needed. PhotoShop will thank you! (As will Word, Excel...)

Gavin
PS You need to clear the font caches as well as moving the fonts around.

Message was edited by: gwjgva

None of the remedies so far have helped me.

I've removed fonts, plugins and everything audio-related from my home directory, then rebooted. Nothing works.

It hasn't been the fonts for me.
It hasn't been the plugins for me.
It hasn't been repairing persmissions for me.
It hasn't been deleting the preference files for me.

Currently I have GarageBand running on another account on my machine. Less than perfect solution, but at least it works.

I wouldn't mind Apple fixing this thing instead of us searcing for a solution more-or-less randomly.

Cool, solved my GarageBand problems 🙂 Font issue.

Hopes Apple fix this asap.



Can we get a list of problematic font families so that we know which fonts to deactivate?

Thank you.

I'm beginning to suspect it's the number of fonts, not any particular one. Removing HelveticaNeue, which worked for one poster, did nothing for me. The only thing that worked was getting it down to a more manageable quantity. That may be why using a fresh account always seems to work: no "clutter".

Maybe there's an issue with system resources? After all, GB is a real hog! Who knows. But I wish whoever does, would tell us...! 🙂

Gavin

Haven't had any issues with GarageBand 08 or any of the other new apps in iLife, but for all those who have, I'd suggest performing a safe boot.

1. Restart with the SHIFT key held down

2. Keep it held down until until login box (you should see the words "safe boot" at the top of this box)

3. You can take your finger off the SHIFT key now

4. Login as per normal

5. Launch Garageband 08 - if it loads okay, one of your system caches (probably a font cache) was indeed corrupt

6. Restart as per usual

If the problem persists after this restart, it's quite likely that one of your fonts is corrupt, as opposed to a font cache. Launch Font Book, select all of your fonts, then select "Validate Font" under the File menu. This should report any problem fonts for you - remove if necessary

Hankheathen thanks. You suggestion totally worked. After weeks of trying to even load the software and restart crashes everytime, the SAFE startup allowed me to go into the software.

On loading a whole bunch of issues involving a PACE extension (used by DigiDesign and others) came up and I found their website, reinstalled it and got garageband to work. I guess there was a conflict. In addition, I did a font check and found two bad ones. Several restarts with the deleted fonts did not fix the problem. It was the extension that was keeping me out.

Awesome advice. Thanks a million.

I have a BRAND NEW I-mac, and am getting the same problem, but it came about a different way.

I worked on an GB tune on a friend's computer.

I brought the file over to my computer

My version of GB said that the loops files (which on my friend's computer were all Apple-loops, he did not import any others) were not available. In fact, none were available.

I called the Apple Care people. They got at least some of the loops back, but not all. So they had me re-install the whole Garage Band. Since this took about 90 minutes to do, they disconnected the phone call.

After going through all that, Garage Band just won't start!!!

I tried removing the fonts to the desktop. And I removed some of the preference files and entire folders from the appsupport/garageband folder.

Nothing works.

I have no idea what all this means. I'm a novice to Macintosh. Indeed, I got a Mac because I want to use Garage Band to make music, and Macs are supposed to "Just Work". When I was able to work in Garage Band on my friend's Mac, it did work. But now I wonder why I left PC world. It was a constant frustration in PC world..but at least the machine was half as expensive, and after long enough time invested in all the stupid PC quirks I could resolve most problems. Now it looks like I have to invest all kinds of energy to learn Mac quirks.

Is it really this bad? Is this what there is to expect? Were all those cool advertisements with PC guy and Apple guy just a hoax?

Generally, you're going to find the Mac world 99.9% problem-free. This looks like a glitch and it will probably be fixed in reasonable timeframe. I would suggest, though, that you provide Apple with feedback on this ( http://www.apple.com/macosx/feedback/) particularly as you are coming from the PC world and this is your first experience of the Mac. Try to be very precise in describing what happens: what folders did you remove etc.

If you bought the Mac at a local Apple store, go in and explain the problem to them. They might suggest simply replacing it (it's new, so shouldn't be causing problems). It could be a hardware fault in your case (it happens, even on Macs) and they would be able to test it very quickly.

Whatever you do, don't panic and start using those Windows fixes you're used to like reinstalling the system!

Gavin

HAPPY DANCE! HAPPY DANCE! HAPPY DANCE!

Bad Font was the culprit!

Thanks, BIG TIME!