Copy favorite loops between Logic and Garageband

Dec 28, '04 10:38:00AM

Contributed by: s1mon

I just received two Apple Jam Packs (Apple loop libraries) for Christmas and I was having fun going through all the loops in the loop browser in Logic. I set up a bunch of favorites and then thought that I felt like sketching up a song in GarageBand instead of Logic. I was stunned to see that the favorites that I spent hours picking weren't there. I first searched for a separate favorites file on the hard drive, but no such luck. Then I searched on the net to see if someone else had come up with a solution to the problem, and I didn't find anything right away.

Anyway I'm writing because I figured out the solution. The problem turns out to be that Logic and GarageBand maintain their own lists of favorites. I assume that Soundtrack does the same thing, but I didn't test this hint with Soundtrack. Fortunately they do this in XML in the preferences files, so it is relatively human-readable. It didn't take much to figure out what I needed to cut and paste.

In your user's Library -> Preferences folder, open com.apple.logic.pro.plist and com.apple.garageband.plist in a text editor, and then copy the favorites from one file to the other. It helps to set at least one favorite in the "blank" application so you know where to paste stuff. And I hope it is also obvious that you probably don't want to muck about in your preferences files without closing the applications and making a backup first!

Look for a set of entries like this (line break added in the section for a narrower display):

<key>DfPrefs_FavoritePaths</key>
  <array>
    <string>/Library/Application Support/GarageBand/Apple Loops/Jam Pack 2 - 
    Remix Tools/Electro Emotion Synth 02.aif</string>
</array>
Obviously your favorites will be different and presumably have more than one entry, but the group of them will be framed by the DfPrefs_FavoritePaths and lines.

Hopefully someone will come out with a utility to sync favorites, or Apple will make this obvious behavior an option in the preferences. In the mean time, cut and paste is faster than manually re-entering favorites.

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