So I was recording MetroBuzz Episode 123 on Monday night when disaster struck. Just as John & I were starting our sign-offs, GarageBand completely quit on me! We had 1:20 minutes of audio recorded and it was all gone. I was so upset. Just as I had resigned myself to listening through John’s side of the conversation and filling in the blanks by memory, he asked, “Well, doesn’t GarageBand have automatic recovery? ” “I don’t think so,” I whined. “This happened to Paul while we were recording ‘The Tribe’ the other night and he was able to recover his audio.” “Oh…?” I wondered, with hope slowly creeping in.
After we recorded the remaining two minutes of the podcast (seriously, we were that close to be finished), I consulted with my dear friend Google: “How do you recover unsaved GarageBand files after it crashes?”
I found this link, followed the really simple instructions, and was able to recover my lost audio. Thank you SO MUCH to whoever runs that blog and posted those instructions and thank you to John for levelheadedly suggesting that all hope was not lost. I’d like to pay it forward and do the same for anyone else who has found themselves in a seemingly disastrous audio situation after GarageBand suddenly crashed on them, too. Here are the steps:
1. Go to “Finder” at the bottom left corner of your docket and find the GarageBand file. If you don’t know how to do this, you’ll go into “Music,” –> “GarageBand” –> the Project File’s Name.
2. Right click on the Project File and select “Show Package Contents.” As you can see, my file was “collmetrobuzz123.” I’m very original with how I save audio files.
3. Select the “Media” folder. In the Media folder, you’ll see different audio options with the .aif extension. Those are the recovered files from your tracks. I only had one track, so I only needed to find the right one, but if you had several tracks going, you should be able to find each of them in there.
4. Drag those files back into GarageBand and hit save!
