Missing Garage Band Loops in Leopard

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.

4 thoughts on “Missing Garage Band Loops in Leopard

  1. jj Reply

    thank you so much i have been trying to fix my missing loop library for like 2 hours and getting pissed till i found your directions of drag and drop to re-link the library. ugh. glad that is done.

  2. zoe Reply

    im having the same problem. Some of the sounds and jingles work but ALOT of them don't work. I tried what you said
    i went to finder/ mac HD/ library/ application support/ garage band/
    but then it comes up with these options:
    instrument library
    learn to play
    magic garageband
    templates

    i have the latest ilife09 so i don't know if its different if you just have OS X leopard VS. OS X snow leopard (what i have). I really want to find out how to get the missing jingly things.

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