Garageband’s Hard Time Limit

I’ve been meaning to switch to Reaper for all our audio editing needs, or perhaps ProLogic, but because Reaper’s interface takes some time to get used to and set-up I’ve put it off. We already use audacity to record single track audio and it’s awful for anything beyond that.

Most of the audio we record has been under or around 30 minutes but today I wanted to create a file of 45 minutes. Garageband (aka garbage-band) has, I discovered, a hard limit in terms of how much time you can create.

So I turned to Google for answers.

Because Garageband’s focus is in the creation of ‘fun’ music projects it has created a hard limit as to how many bars of music you can create in 4/4 at 120 beats/minute. I had forgotten that Garageband’s underlying focus was bars and beats.

The solution was to simply slow down the tempo and apparently voila you have the potential for hours of time. Except I made the mistake of doing this after my project was complete. Garageband does not respect the ‘time’ between edits, or audio files, and everything is spread unevenly all over the place. A complete mess. Returning the tempo to its original state does not help. The audio files do not return to their original location, they remain a mess. So we must start anew.

Garageband is a good enough tool for those creating podcasts on a Mac. But one thing that is missing from many getting started guides is the advice to change the tempo before you start creating your tracks. You can do that by going to the track menu and dragging the difficult to see blue line up and down to your desired tempo.