Change the location of the GarageBand libraries

Jan 20, '04 10:35:00AM

Contributed by: astroboy

If you are like me and your powerbook's hard drive space is precious, you'd better put those GarageBand loops some other place. Unfortunately, Apple's installer does not let you do that, and if you try to put them some other place and create an alias in the right place, the app will complain that it can't find the files.

The solution lies in the UNIX layer of OS X. Simply create symbolic links of the directories instead of regular alias files. To do that, you need to:

  1. Move the GarageBand folder contents into another folder (I did not move the GarageBand folder itself, in case the app wants to have it on the same hard drive for any unknown reasons). The three directories to move are named Apple Loops, Apple Loops Index, and Instrument Library.

  2. Launch the Terminal and type:
     % cd /Library/Application\ Support/GarageBand/
  3. Create the links to the moved folders:
     % ln -s /Volumes/DiskName/Path/Apple\ Loops/ ./Apple\ Loops
     % ln -s /Volumes/DiskName/Path/Apple\ Loops\ Index/ ./Apple\ Loops\ Index
     % ln -s /Volumes/DiskName/Path/Instrument\ Library/ ./Instrument\ Library
    Replace DiskName with the name of the hard drive holding the directories, and replaced Path with the names of any subdirectories between the hard drive and the location of the loop files.
GarageBand should launch and your loops should be visible by clicking the eye icon on the bottom ... Voila!

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