Now that iLife '04 has been released, many people have GarageBand and Jam Pack. And quite a few also have Soundtrack. Many of those that have both have dropped their Soundtrack loops into GarageBand to get an extra 4000 loops in their GarageBand collection. There's only one problem. 2000 of those are duplicates of your GarageBand and Jam Pack songs. I have compiled a list of the songs that are copies from Soundtrack. I have also created a shell script which will delete the duplicates from the Soundtrack files -- over 2 GB worth of unneeded loops!
Here are lists of the duplicates. These lists are only for informational purposes and are not needed to run the script.
Loop Duplications for GarageBand and Soundtrack - Total: 726
Loop Duplications for Jam Pack and Soundtrack - Total: 1429
Loop Duplications for GarageBand and Jam Pack - Total: 20
The script can be downloaded here.
To run this script, you will have to make sure it is executable (chmod 755 gb-deletedupes.sh) and you run the script from the Terminal. It has three options. It can delete only the loops in list one, only the loops in list two, or all the loops from both list one and list two. I will give examples of each use.
If you don't have the Jam Pack, you only need to delete the songs from list one. The ones from list two aren't duplicates for you. So you need to use the -g option:
% ./gb-deletedupes.sh -g Soundtrack\ Loops
If you do have the Jam Pack installed, then you'd want to delete all the duplicates from both lists one and two. To do that, use the -b option:% ./gb-deletedupes.sh -b Soundtrack\ Loops
If you have already run this script to delete the loops from list one, and then installed the Jam Pack and only need to delete the loops from list two, then use the -j option:% ./gb-deletedupes.sh -j Soundtrack\ Loops
This script has basic checking and verification built-in. It asks for confirmation before doing anything and lets you know exactly what you chose to do before you do it. It is best to run this script before you add the loops to GarageBand. To do that, simply copy the Soundtrack Loops folder off the Soundtrack Loops DVD. Then just run the script with that folder as the directory. If you have already added the Soundtrack Loops to GarageBand, simply use the Soundtrack Loops folder inside /Library -> Application Support -> GarageBand -> Apple Loops. Make sure GarageBand is not running when you remove the files. Then, you must have GarageBand reindex the loops. You can do this simply by selecting one of the deleted songs, such as "Edgy Modern Rock Bass 22." It will see the song is missing and ask to reindex.Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20040126045617781