GarageBand crashes when opening older songs in iPadOS 26.2.1

GarageBand crashes on opening older songs in iPadOS 26.2.1 -

Another issue has arisen, with GarageBand, after upgrading to iPadOS 26.2.1 , which is that any issue with certain Audio Units, can cause a ‘lingering’ tendency to crash GB on starting up a song.

EG ‘Audio Unit SunthySynth (made-up!) is not installed on your iPad..’ and then while I did manage to delete the AU in question, and slot in another workable one in the song, when I made a backup copy of the song, that sTILL behaves as if the self-same Audio Unit is still missing - but to my knowledge, it only appeared on one track and I now have deleted that and substituted another I placed the MIDI data into.

GarageBand needs to be able to handle bad Audio Units, and preferably flag them up. Given it does not, does anyone have a fix for getting into the song long enough to do the delete & replace task?

Problem is, if GB crashes this way, simply swiping it away does not work - if you do not restart the device, GB will just keep doing the crash.

In practice I either tolerate a large ‘pop’ from the speaker I attach it to, or have to switch that speaker off…well, it’s a palaver. Any assistance appreciated. It’s blocking me from accessing older songs - I mean 6 months older than Jan 2026.