One of the things I love about Garageband is how easily I can take a song from conception to final mix without ever leaving the main screen or dealing with routing issues. Every now and then I run into a tip on how to do a particular process on Garageband that reminds me just how cool this little (free) program is. This week I learned about another little trick that has helped me save loads of time when archiving my projects. It’s called “track locking”.
Track locking is used in Garageband to freeze a software track or group of tracks to relieve your CPU from the extensive load it gets when working with software instruments. The process is simple. Once you’ve fine tune the software track, click the lock icon on the tracks you want frozen then hit the “play” button. GB will convert the instrument tracks to audio tracks and store them on your hard drive.
Once you do this, the track(s) are locked and you’re limited to only being able to do minimal stuff like volume & panning, but if you do need to make other changes, simply unlock the track, make your changes then lock it again.
I try to make it a habit that after I have finished working on a song, I convert all the midi and software tracks to audio (a good thing to do no matter what DAW you use). You never know when you might need to come back to a song to make some changes and you don’t have access to the original VST or software instruments. I can tell you from personal experience that having everything stored as audio files can be a saving grace.
In the past, the only way I knew how to do this in Garageband was to solo the instrument track I wanted to convert, and then bounce it down to .AIFF file. I would then repeat the same procedure with each software tracks. This was a pain to do when you’re working with a large number of software tracks. It is so time consuming that you may not even bother to do it at all.
Enter the track locking feature! Whenever you lock a software track a new audio file it creates is stored in the Garageband folder called “Freeze files”. If you’re use to working with other DAW, at first it may not be easy to locate these folders but here’s how you get to them.
Simply control click on your Garageband song icon. From the drop down list, choose “Show Package Folder”. Inside you’ll find several folders, but the two most important for this issue would be the “Freeze” and the “Media” folder. The “Freeze” will contain all the software tracks that you converted to audio. The “Media” folder will hold all the audio you recorded into GB (ex: vocals, live guitars, etc.). For more details, click here:
BTW: if you record guitar or bass using GB amp modules, it’s a good idea to save those as audio files as well.
One last thing you’ll also want to do is to “merge” all the regions of your Real Instruments tracks into one single file for each track. Example; if you have a vocal track with 7 regions, merge them all into one and rename it “vocals”. You can do this by simply highlighting all the regions, and choose “Join” from the Edit menu. Repeat the same thing for all the Real Instrument tracks on your project. This will avoid you from having an audio folder with multiple files of the same track. Unless of course you prefer to have them split up.
By keeping both your Freeze folder and Media folder organized, you’ll be able to easily come back to your project and load it into any recording program with minimum hassle.
Yes GB has it’s limitation, which easily can be relieved by purchasing Logic Express for less than $200. But I still find there is less technical interuption when writing a new song on GB than in any other program I’ve used.
