As many of you know, last weekend Corey Hicks came to our little town and had a concert. You also know it was off the chain! Well, someone (who will remain unnamed) insisted that I record the concert. So I did what any uber-geek would do–I brought my Mac and hooked it up to one of the best sound set-ups I have ever seen. Especially for a small concert. (Thanks to James Helton of Audio Plus in Atmore for the great set up.)
I went ahead and created a Garage Band file named “Summer Jam 2010.” I was busy with a lot of other things, so I had someone just press record on the laptop when the concert started. After the concert they just shut the lid without saving. No big deal, though, because Garage Band was still open and running. When I got home I immediately started playing with the audio. I was frustrated with the edits I made and I didn’t want them saved, so I quit Garage Band without saving in order to start the next day fresh.
To my horror, I realized that I quit Garage Band without ever having saved ANY of the show! I panicked and almost began to cry. Diana was trying to console me, and we figured that surely the audio files HAVE to be somewhere. We did some looking around, and were able to recover the entire show, even though we had never saved it. I am not sure if this will work every time, but it worked for us.
I opened my project after closing it, and this was what I was greeted with:
If this happens to you don’t panic yet… Go back to the Finder, find your Garage Band project file, right-click on it, and select “show package contents.”
Navigate to “Media” and you will see some audio files (the ones with the .aif extension).
Select these files and drag them to the desktop.
Finally, open your Garage Band file and drag the audio files back in.
Save your project immediately! You now have your lost Garage Band audio back! Hopefully you won’t ever lose your files, but if you do, now you know how to find them again.
Mr. James is a good man. I like him.
THANK YOU VERRY MUCH
I WAS LOST WITH OUT YOUR POST ON THIS BLOG
THK A LOT
FROM ROMANIA -BUCHAREST ANDREY
Thank you so much for this. I was going to re record my whole project, all I had to do was re order everything. Big time saver. Thanks!
Mine were lbm files boo.. what to do now..
yeah hey….i haven’t been able to solve my issue of recovering 2 hours of work on a song….i am a mac user….btw….tried to steps you layed out, and i can’t seem to find any ‘media’ folder…
i started a song (under one title)…picked it back up, completed it, and upon completion chose ‘save as’ (in order to save under a different name), clicked on ‘save as’ and soon after, garageband crashed and did not save any of the work i had done….i saved it with ‘$’ as my first part i guess….did that have anything to do with it?? the fact that i saved it as a character (not a word)…i also sampled a song off my itunes….only a small part….and also used loops not off of garageband….
i dunno…i already called apple and did some research and i still can’t seem to get the lost contents…any suggestions??
I had this exact thing happen last night. My computer shut down due to batteries while i was working in garageband prior to a save. Im really bummed. When i reopen the project it was blank. After thinking I had lost everything, i tried to lay down from memory parts of what I had done, which wasnt very fruitful, and then saved. Now I think i have really ruined my chances. Im trying your method anyway but I cant get a “show package contents” option show up. Any suggestions? Thanks
hi I tried all above and there were no audio files.
I’ve lost all my files on a lot of songs because of this reason i think:
I was trying to clean up my system and downloaded Xslimmer which gets rid of any information not relevant to your computer.. In the process it shrinks the size of your programs to about half the size. I didnt back up any of my current garage band stuff and while it was slimming Garage band i think it lost the audio files to a large number of important songs.
THey are lost and so am I
You saved my life! I had been working on a Garage Band project for a summer camp of 10-14 year olds and thought I was going to have to re-record everything and edit quickly. (Camp ends tomorrow).
I can’t thank you enough!!!!!!!!!!
–Michelle
I have my midterms tomorrow and I thought I lost my recordings of my professor’s lectures!! Thank you sooooo very much!!
-Paula
I am so glad that this has help so many of you guys. For those with more question, I am sorry I don’t really understand how and why it all worked. We just found these steps that work for us.
I usually don’t comment on posts like this but I just had to this time.
Thanks to you, I was able to recover an hour long audio file that was “lost” in March of 2009!
Same scenario as you (live recording of concert). What a trip down memory lane, thanks so much!
Absolutely heart-broken. I’ve spent all summer trying to record an EP and doing fairly successfully – I lose all my media files, and found this forum.
I can find the media file, but its empty. The only thing in there is two empty folders, labelled “images” and “recording” as well as a plaintext file called projectdata. What do i do now? because I’m close to lying on the road and waiting for traffic. thank you
I saved the project from beginning to end and put it in the sidebar for later. When I came back to work on it again it was gone completely … it shows up in recent activity, but when i try to open it says “file can’t be opened”. I feel like dying.
You just saved my life. Literally. Thanks!
thank u
THANK YOU SOOOOOO MUCH.
This post saved me a HUGE amount of time.
Thank you so much!!!
you just saved my thesis. THANK YOU!
Im not seeing the files when clicking on show content/ media …not even the tracks that are still there…any idea if there is another place that lost files hide? thanks
oh my.
but how to restore, when I accidentaly pressen “dont save”?
I see the file still is 520 MB, but I cannot acces it anymore, because it apparently had not been saved prior to my “dont save”
please, anyone?
SAVED MY LIFE. I had an hour long formal interview sitting in garage band when I did the exact same thing you did, and I almost died when I realized I deleted it. Thanks so much for this easy to follow tutorial!
THANK YOU!! I work at a church and after trimming part of the audio I accidentally hit save instead of save as and so I thought I had lost the original audio file but thanks to this post, I was able to find the original file in the depths of the hard drive.
for some reason i have gone into garageband and it can’t find the files and in my trash can it says no effect* no 02 and i can’t put back. can any one help me please?
THANKYOU SOOOOO MUCH!!!
I am organising a linguistics presentation for two days time and I had all of the interviews saved in GarageBand and without this post, I would have been very veeeeeery lost!
Thankyou so very much for posting and helping loads of people who I assume would have used this post and not left a comment.
also, I recovered my files from a folder called ´Output´ after you click on ´Show Package Contents´ – not in ´Media´, if this helps anyone else trying to recover their lost files.