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I want to export ALL the audio tracks from garageband to audacity. I searched on the internet and it is apparently not possible ( here for instance), or better it is possible but one track at time.

It seems so weird that nobody found a workaround or wrote a software which performs this acrion...

So, my questions are:

  1. is it possible to export the whole (ALL TRACKS) garageband project to audacity?
  2. is it possible to export the whole garageband project to any other multi-track recording software?

2 Answers 2

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While you can't export directly to Audacity, you can get pretty close using a workaround. The secret is to freeze all of your tracks using Garageband's temporary-rendering feature. Internally, this means that all of your tracks are being rendered, individually, as AIFF files.

You can get to these files by ctrl+clicking the .band file and choosing "View Package Contents." Somewhere in the folder hierarchy is a folder called Freeze Files, which contains the AIFF recordings of your last freeze. Copy these to another folder, and import them into Audacity as separate tracks.

You can also import them into any other audio software that allows AIFF import, which is a pretty common feature.

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  • It's worth mentioning that I haven't used Garageband with any regularity since version 2, and I might be remembering the names or steps slightly incorrectly. If so, please edit the answer to fix the errors.
    – Warrior Bob
    May 30, 2012 at 21:33
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I'm told you can export m4a from Garageband. This should be an ADTS encapsulated AAC stream. You can decode that to PCM (wav files) using FAAD2 and audacity will import that just fine. Its not lossless but 192 kbit/s AAC is good enough for most purposes.

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  • Thanks for the answer, but it is not clear if you can bulk export all tracks or you have to do it track by track.
    – Daniele B
    May 26, 2012 at 10:05
  • Can't you export it as flat aac at 320kbps at 24bit with 44.1k
    – Cole Johnson
    May 27, 2012 at 0:12
  • what do you mean?
    – Daniele B
    May 29, 2012 at 0:25

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