Quick Tip: Page (1) of 1 - 09/10/06

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Charlie White and I had just finished recording an awesome new episode of The Coolness Roundup (The Tech Show for Everyone) podcast, when BAM!  GarageBand decided to crash before the show could be saved.

Rerecording the show was out of the question, because recreating spontaneity makes a show sound cheap and staged, and after a sudden failure like GarageBand quitting on you, the team is pretty deflated, not wanting to spend yet another hour rerecording the show.  I know this has happened to many other podcasters, so before you turn off the system and sulk away for the night, follow this tip to see if you can recover your work.

One of the great things about Soundtrack Pro is it doesn?t create a temporary cache of your recording that you have to save to use; instead, it records the file directly to the hard drive.  This way, if Soundtrack Pro crashes, the audio file can be recovered by going to the capture scratch drive and opening it back up.  Even though GarageBand is several levels below Soundtrack Pro in many respects, it should still operate on the same principal ? and it does if you know how to work it.

When you create a new project in GarageBand, it asks you to name the file and the drive you wish to save it on. 

On the surface this looks like an ordinary everyday project file that is a pointer to all of your media.  Try as you might, you won?t find a folder anywhere on the hard drive that includes your recorded media.  But the project file actually contains more than it appears.

If GarageBand crashes before you have a chance to save the project, the live instrument tracks will appear to be gone forever when you reopen the project file.  Fear not dear reader, those files are lurking, waiting to be saved.

Locate the project file on your hard drive and right click.  From the pop up menu select Show Package Contents.

GarageBand does indeed work like Soundtrack Pro; it records your audio to the hard drive in real time instead of creating a virtual file.  When you select Show Package Contents, a folder will open that contains all of the live instrument tracks in .aif format.

To add the ?lost? tracks back to your project, simply drag the .aif file from the folder to the GarageBand project window.  GarageBand will import the file and everything all will be right with the world once again.

If you want to check out our podcast, head on over to www.coolnessroundup.com

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