Garageband Compression

Question

Garageband Compression

I have a problem. So I want to send my Garageband file in an email, maintaining the Garageband layout. Basically send the ".band" file. Obviously to do this you have to create a ".zip" file of it. I was looking around on the internet how to compress a Garageband file into a ".zip" file. And after searching for a while I discovered that you click on the file, go to the dropdown "File" menu, and click compress. But when I tried to do it, the compress option is greyed out and won't let me compress it and there's no option to create an archive of the file when I right click it.

So what should I do? It seems as though I should be doing everything right, but something wrong is going on. Any suggestions?

Thanks

Mac OS X, Mac OS X (10.6.1)

Posted on Jul 15, 2011 6:52 PM

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Answer 1

Jul 15, 2011 11:05 PM in response to Leroy Vanderbilt

I think you are confusing two things (which are easy to confuse, since they are both called compression, but are completely different):

- From within GB, there's the menu item File - Save As ... - Compress Project. This will compress the audio files in your project, degrading the audio quality irreversibly, but still maintaining the GB project format, so you can't email this version either. If your project contains no audio files, but only software instruments, the option is greyed out, since there is nothing to compress.

- In the Finder, you can compress (= zip) any file or folder. This is a lossless form of compression - if you decompress it on the other end, you have exactly the same object that you started out with. Ctrl-click the project and select "Compress ..." from the context menu.

To send your project, you want to use the second version, the Finder operation. Mind that the resulting .zip file may still be too large to email.

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