GarageBand file won't open

it's kind of amazing that ANY of the files open, GB makes use of a type of file that only exists on a mac formatted disk.

the first things i'd try are the easy route, the oddball problem fix:

first two things to try for “oddball” probs:

http://www.bulletsandbones.com/GB/GBFAQ.html#oddballprobs

(Let the page FULLY load. The link to your answer is at the top of your screen)

post back if those don't work, i have one other idea.

okay, i didn't have high hopes for those, but they're easy to at least try.

slightly more complicated, and the only other idea i have:

open GB

create a new project

once it's saved, quit GB

control-click this newly saved GB project in Finder, and choose Show Contents

throw out everything that opens in that window

leave it open

control click one of your bad projects, and again "show contents"

select everything in the bad project's window

hold down the optionKey and drag all those bits into the New project window we left open above.

close these two window we've opened via the Show Contents bit, and try opening that new project we've created (double-click the new file, not the old one).

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i've never tried this before (never had a "windows damaged" file with which to play), so odds are probably 60:40 in favour, but it's about the only Hail Mary thing i can think of that might work (and maybe it's more like 70:30, really).

good luck! ~~Hang

Okay, so here's how you fix this. I've seen several posts on the internet, and nobody fixed this problem. It appears that when I moved my garageband files to my external (and windows formatted) hard drive, the projectData file was corrupted. Bringing these files back to my mac, finder identified it as a unix executable file. The projectData file is just xml. Here's what to do:

1. Start a new project in GarageBand. Save it and quit GarageBand.

2. Go to your corrupted project, the one that won't open and do a 'apple right click' (control + click). Select Show Package Contents. A garageband project is just a folder. You could also go it the information on the file (apple + i) and remove the .band extension. It then becomes a normal folder.

3. You will see two files in your project, a media folder and projectData. Open projectData in an editor (textEdit). In this file you will see a bunch of xml fields. The biggest entry is in the field <data>. Copy everything from the data field (no xml flags - nothing surrounded by < or >). It will be a long list of weird characters.

4. Go to your new project that you just created and saved. Show Package Contents for this file. Open the new project's projectData.

5. Paste the <data> from your corrupted project into the <data> of your new project.

6. Copy your media project from your old project to your new project.

7. Close finder window.

8. Double Click your new project and GarageBand should bring up your music.

Jarvis Von

I had the same problem and tried copying the <data> section of the Project Data as mentioned above. It showed me the same issue.

The exact message of my corrupted file is "GB found 33 audio files in 8 bit format. This format is unsupported and cannot be played back".

I can pull up all the AIFFs from the media folder and they play fine and can be imported just fine into another GB session. When I created the new blank GB file, I moved the contents piece by piece and the trouble seems to be located in the projectData file...and now specifically in the "<data> section with what I just tried. Is there something in that data section that tells GB that it was saved in 8 bit that I can correct?

Thanks!