Sharing GarageBand Files

This article will identify all the steps necessary to ensure your GarageBand files can be safely uploaded to SharePoint and to be successfully imported back into GarageBand. It is important to follow these steps correctly as incorrect uploads will fail to be opened once downloaded from SharePoint.

Compressing and Uploading Your GarageBand Project

Once you have saved, close GarageBand and then you will want to navigate to the save location within Finder, which can be launched from the Smiley face icon in the System Tray, or by using the Spotlight Search (cmd + space) and typing 'Finder'. In the example shown above, the GarageBand file 'MyGarageBandProject' was saved under Documents\GarageBand. Once you have found your saved GarageBand file, you will want to right-click on it, and select the 'Compress' option.

It is worth noting that whilst GarageBand is open, the file itself is in use, meaning the compression will not complete until the program has been closed. After the completion of the compression, and additional zip archive will be present in the same location as your GarageBand project. This zip archive is the item that needs to be be added to OneDrive to allow sharing of the file whilst maintaining functionality as a GarageBand associated file.

Downloading and Decompressing Your GarageBand Project

You will need to access the OneDrive browser by navigating to the following link: https://www.office.com/onedrive. Navigate to the GarageBand zip archive, and download it locally to your Apple device. Once downloaded, navigate to your Downloads folder in Finder, and double-click the zip archive. This will automatically extract the contents of the zip archive to the same directory. If working with multiple GarageBand files, it would be recommended to create a new folder structure to clearly identify GarageBand projects with similar names. Double-clicking on the extracted .band file should launch the GarageBand project as expected.

What will happen if the file is uploaded incorrectly?

If the GarageBand project file is not zipped, when uploaded in OneDrive, it will be marked as a .pkfg. When this file has been downloaded, and attempted to be executed, the user will be prompted that there is no none application to launch this file type. This is the reason why compressing the file into a zip archive is required.