9.2. Moving Your Loops to Another Drive

9.2. Moving Your Loops to Another Drive

Those GarageBand loops are greatbut lordy, they're big. The 1,100 of them that come with a basic GarageBand installation take up 1.1 GB of hard drive space and each Jam Pack, if you install one, can easily scarf down between 3 and 10 gigs.

That's all fine if you sit all day in front of your Power Mac G5 with its 240 GB hard drive. But if you're using a laptop, that's a lot of real estate for a program that may (ahem) not be the software that earns you your living.

The question inevitably arises: "How can I move those loops to another drive to save space?"

For example, maybe you have an iPod that, when you're home, you use as an external hard drive for your PowerBook. And maybe you want to store your loops there. (Let's assume that when you're traveling with the PowerBook, you don't use GarageBand and therefore have no need for its loops.)

1. Open your hard drive Library Audio folder. Copy the Apple Loops folder to your second drive .

   A hard drive, please . Anything slower (like a DVD) will slow down GarageBand too much.

2. Open the Apple Loops folder. Throw away everything inside .

   For example, choose Edit Select All ( -A), and then File Move to Trash (Shift- -Delete).

   You're not throwing away the folder only what's inside it.

3. Now open the Apple Loops Index folder, also in the Audio folder. Throw away everything inside it .

   Once again, leave the folderjust discard what's in it.

4. Open GarageBand again. Click the eyeball icon to open the Loop browser .

   GarageBand warns you that it can't find the loops. Click OK.

   

   Figure 9-3. It might feel a little odd dragging a copy of your Apple Loops folder into the Loop browser, so that GarageBand can recognize the exact same Apple loops it had in the first place. But this is the official routine for moving loops to a different hard drive.

   
   

5. Find the copy of the Apple Loops folder on the second hard drive, and drag it directly into the Loop browser, as shown in Figure 9-3 .

   GarageBand briskly indexes your loops (takes note of their new location)and then is ready to roll. Ta-da! Reclaimed space.