GarageBand crashes, then deletes my sound files!

Question

GarageBand crashes, then deletes my sound files!

I have a major problem. GarageBand has deleted a huge portion of mu podcast and destroyed hours of work.

What happened, is that i crashed. I got the not helpful "GarageBand has stopped unexpectedly" message, no useful explanation.

When I started the program again, it gives me a startup message that says: "Garage Band can not fint files: (FILENAME).

The missing files are all mye files, not loops from the built in library. See screenshot. ("Fant ikke lydfilen" means "did not find sound file" in norwegian.)

When I open the program, it looks like this:

The files still have "placeholders" (I don´t know the correct term), but no actual sounds in them.

I would very much appreciate any help with this, or any hints as to how I can contact Apple Support (real people!). This is costing me a lot of time, and as I am self-employed that actually means I cost me a lot of money.

Posted on May 1, 2016 8:44 AM

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Answer 1

léonie

Level 10

194,807 points

May 1, 2016 9:09 AM in response to Ingebjorg Berg Holm

It looks like GarageBand crashed before you saved the project to the disk and it did not yet add the three missing audio files to the .band package of your project.

First check, if the files are in the project : Select your project in the Finder, ctrl-click or right-click it, then select the command "Show Package Contents". In the window that will open, open the folder Media, and inside this folder "Audio Files".

Are the missing files there?

If the files are indeed missing, import them again to GarageBand to a different track. Save the project, quit GarageBand to make it close the library, then open it again. Can GarageBand now find the missing files?

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Answer 2

May 1, 2016 9:48 AM in response to léonie

Thank you! This helped a lot, and saved me a lot of time in the reconstruction of the project.

It is still some unresolved issues, though.

1.) I had saved project with the missing files long time ago, and closed and opened the program several times without any issues. Why does Garageband suddenly lose them? Is there anything I can do to prevent that from happening?

2.) I reccord my narration voice directly in Garageband, then I cut and trim the file, endin gup with several seperate pieces of the sound in the track. (See screenshot in above post.)

It seems like the program then treats my sound"bites" as different files, numering then Narration Vocal 1, 2, 3 and so on.

I do not save the files as soundfiles anywhere, I have only reccorded them in GarageBand. Is there anywhere I can find the soundfiles if this happens?

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Answer 3

léonie

Level 10

194,807 points

May 1, 2016 10:59 AM in response to Ingebjorg Berg Holm

I do not save the files as soundfiles anywhere, I have only reccorded them in GarageBand. Is there anywhere I can find the soundfiles if this happens?

Save your project frequently while you are working. GarageBand likes to keep the edits and changes stored in its caches and does not continually update the save project on the disk.

If something causes GarageBand to crash the most recent recordings and edits will be lost.

By saving different versions of your project to the disk as you go, you can easily revert to different stages of your project. and if you keep Time Machine running in the background you can recover previous versions from your backup drive, if you are saving the project frequently.

1.) I had saved project with the missing files long time ago, and closed and opened the program several times without any issues. Why does Garageband suddenly lose them? Is there anything I can do to prevent that from happening?

That is hard to tell from afar. Possible reasons are a permissions problem, if you opened the project from a different user account or accessed it over the network. For example, if you stored the project on a synced volume, like DropBox or Google Drive. Or a problem with an incompatible file system. Is the drive with the projects formatted OS X Extended, as it should be?

It seems like the program then treats my sound"bites" as different files, numering then Narration Vocal 1, 2, 3 and so on.

Did you use a plug-in with your project? I have never seen this happen.

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Answer 4

May 1, 2016 11:01 AM in response to léonie

Thank you so much! I store my files in Dropbox, so that might be the problem. I will now try saving on disc instead.

You saved me tons of work, I am really grateful!

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Answer 5

léonie

Level 10

194,807 points

May 1, 2016 11:12 AM in response to Ingebjorg Berg Holm

You're welcome 🙂

I store my files in Dropbox, so that might be the problem.

You could compress the project before storing it in DropBox. And move it to your Mac and uncompress it before working on it.

Compressing it will prevent Dropbox from breaking the internal links when syncing.

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