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Move the Garageband and Factory Logic Instruments off your hard drive

Posted on Tuesday 21 July 2009

I finally successfully moved my entire Garageband/Logic library off of my internal hard drive and cleared up about 14 GB of space. These are instructions for Logic users, I do not know if this breaks Garageband (I don’t have it/use it). Here’s how to do it:

On your external drive, make a “Sampler Instruments” folder. Then go to Macintosh HD > Library > Application Support > GarageBand > Instrument Library > Sampler > Sampler Instruments and copy everything in that folder to the external “Sampler Instruments” folder. Delete everything in the internal HD Sampler Instruments folder.

On your external drive, make a “Samples” folder. Then go to Mackintosh HD > Library > Application Support > GarageBand > Instrument Library > Sampler > Sampler files and copy everything to the external “Samples” folder. Delete everything in the internal HD sampler instruments folder.

I also moved my default logic instruments:

I copied everything in Macintosh HD > Library > Application Support > Logic > Sampler Instruments to my external “Sampler Instruments” folder. I made two folders, “GarageBand” and “Logic 8” to separate the two libraries. Then I deleted everything in the Macintosh HD Sampler Instruments folder.

Then I copied everything in Macintosh HD > Library > Application Support > Logic > EXS Factory Samples to my “Samples” folder. If you made two folders, “GarageBand” and “Logic 8”, you have to do the exact same here.

Finally, on your external drive, create aliases (File > Make Alias) of the Samples and Sampler Instruments folders, and drag them to your Macintosh HD > Library > Application Support > Logic folder. (Garageband users, you may have to do the same in the Application Support > GarageBand > Instrument Library > Sampler folder.)

Now logic should be able to find all of your garage band and factory instruments on the external drive.

When I tried to empty the trash, I got a bunch of “file in use” errors. I hacked around this with a terminal command here (that my blog won’t let me reproduce due to mod_security). This broke my trash functionality temporarily – when I would trash new items, Finder would warn me that they would be deleted immediately – but a reboot fixed that.

The only problem with this solution is when you open old projects, you get multiple “File Path Select” dialogs saying there are multiple matches (duplicates) for the files you’re loading. You will have to point Logic to your new Samples directory, but after you save your project you will only have to do this once.


2 Comments for 'Move the Garageband and Factory Logic Instruments off your hard drive'

  1.  
    Max Morrisq
    June 15, 2011 | 12:31 am
     

    Hello…

    I just put my GarageBand samples onto the hard drive and made alias’…

    Everything is fine.

    The I put my Logic samples onto it with the same method and made alias’…

    Now logic won’t load any instruments….

    Any suggestions?

  2.  
    June 15, 2011 | 12:50 am
     

    Try closing and reopening Logic.
    Did you put the aliases in /Library/Application Support/Logic ?

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