GarageBand Export to iTunes command: cuts off echo at end of song

Posted by Pierre Igot in: GarageBand, Music
July 30th, 2004 • 6:43 am

If you have a GarageBand composition that you want to save as a sound file, the only way to do it is to use the “Export to iTunes” command, which is not customizable and gives you no choice but to add the sound file to your iTunes library as an AIFF recording. It would be much more appropriate if Apple had included a general “Export” command that lets you choose the destination and the format.

A more serious problem with the command, however, is what happens if your composition features a track that has some echo. If this track contains something that goes all the way to the very end of the composition, the echo effectively goes beyond the time spot where the song ends. (You can hear a few more repeats of the sound before it fades out.)

Unfortunately, GarageBand doesn’t take this into account at all. When it exports your composition to an AIFF file, it simply cuts it off where the last track that contains something ends, regardless of whether the track has some echo or not. If the track has some echo, the song will be cut off before the echo has faded out.

This is quite unfortunate. Fortunately, there’s a fairly easy work-around: Just take another track that has a software instrument, copy a bar of notes and paste it farther than the time spot where the song currently ends, and edit the bar by removing all its notes. You’ll effectively have added a bar of silence, and this silence (and the echo in the other track) will be included when exporting the composition to iTunes.

Still, we shouldn’t have to use such a work-around in the first place.


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