Reader Ricardo Estrada has a follow-up question on a recent exchange about moving GarageBand Jam Packs to another drive. He writes:
I read and followed all your instructions on moving specific Jam Pack folders to my external drive. I cleared up 6.2 GBs of space on my hard drive, but now I have two of every loop that was moved on GarageBand’s loop browser. I can’t figure out how to deleted the unwanted loops from the Garage Band’s browser.Also, do you know how this will impact the Logic 7 Express I intend to buy for Christmas?
When I performed the actions described in my response, GarageBand behaved itself—showing no duplicate loops and correctly playing those loops I’d added from the external drive. It should work for you as well, but if it doesn’t, there’s another way to re-index your loops. According to Apple’s Rebuilding the Loop Index in GarageBand KnowledgeBase article, you do this (and I quote):
1. Log in with an administrator account. 2. If GarageBand is open, quit it. 3. Click the Finder icon in the Dock. 4. From the Go menu, choose Go to Folder. 5. Type: /Library/Application Support/GarageBand/Apple Loops Index 6. Click Go. 7. Drag all “Search Index” files from the Apple Loops Index folder to the Trash. (These files will be rebuilt later.) 8. Open GarageBand. 9. Click the Loop Browser button. You may see the “No Apple Loops Found” message. 10. Click the Finder icon in the Dock. 11. From the Go menu, choose Go to Folder. 12. Type: /Library/Application Support/GarageBand/ 13. Click Go. 14. Locate the Apple Loops folder in the GarageBand folder, then drag the Apple Loops folder from the Finder into the Loop Browser in GarageBand. 15. Repeat steps 11-14, replacing /Library/Application Support/GarageBand/ with ~/Library/Audio/ and then /Library/Audio/
As for Logic Express, it uses the same loop library as GarageBand and should do the right thing if you’ve configured GarageBand’s loop library as I originally outlined.