Import AIFF files into GarageBand

Jan 20, '04 10:40:00AM

Contributed by: spiffyguy

Okay for starters, I have just recently bought and installed iLife, including the new GarageBand, onto my computer. The first day I played around with it and was very impressed with the ease of use of the app. I had already compiled some songs in a different app about a month ago, and wanted to use the AIFF files I had on my hard driive with GarageBand. To my surprise, there was no "Import audio from file" option in the file menu.

Looking at my GarageBand document "My Song," I noticed it was a package whose contents could be observed. Inside I found a folder with audio files from some vocal recordings I was testing. The names were Recording#01.aif, Recording#02.aif, etc. The extension on each of them were .aif, so this gave me an idea. I decided to replace one of these aif files with my precompiled song. Sure enough, when I re-opened "My Song" in GarageBand, the song was played instead of the vocal recording. So for the recap:

  1. In GarageBand, record any audio from any input device and save the document.

  2. In the finder, view the "Package Contents" of your song document and navigate to the Media folder.

  3. Rename your existing AIFF song to the name of the file in the Media folder (ie: Recording#01.aif) and replace the audio file from step 1.

  4. Re-open your document in GarageBand. When you play your audio input, it is now the prerecorded AIFF! You can now stretch, crop or do anything to it that you would do with prerecorded loops.
I did some research and found no hint like this anywhere so I decided to share this with the community.

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