Missing Garage Band Loops in Leopard
In GarageBand 4 (part of iLife 09) it’s easy to have issues with the sound loops. There are after all over two gigabytes of them. On top of that when first installing iLife you may want to opt out of installing all them to save space. To make things confusing, when Garage Band is uninstalled some of the more popular loops are still present.
Usually just clicking on a missing loop will trigger GarageBand to attempt to install them from the iLife DVD, or better yet via Software Update. But this does not always work. In addition, manually reinstalling iLife does not fix either.
To get this auto-install to work again open up the loop library in GarageBand. (It’s the eye icon) In finder go to /Library/Application Support/Garageband/ drag the Sound Loops folder into the loop library portion of Garageband. This will recreate the index files of all the loops. In some cases you may need to delete the Index out of /Library/Application Support/Garageband/ first.
After the index is recreated, click on one of the missing loops again. Tell GarageBand to reinstall. Once it does the full range of loops will be back. Keep in mind that the download is 1.1GB in size, so installing off the iLife DVD may be faster.