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Whenever I export a song to disk from GarageBand, it automatically adds a few seconds of silence to the end.

I don't want that silence, as the files I'm exporting are sound effect mixes to be played manually one at a time. I know that I can go into Audacity and manually remove all of the silence at the end, but I'd rather avoid spending that much time cleaning up after GarageBand.

Is there a way to tell GarageBand not to add silence to the end of tracks it exports?

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2 Answers

up vote 3 down vote accepted

As far as I know, GarageBand doesn't add anything to the end of exported tracks, but it exports as much as there's sound in any track. Therefore, to avoid having extra "stuff" exported, you should always create a loop region and export with that. As you can see in the following picture, I'm at second 47 in the "timeline", however, I've created a region (the yellow bar on top) that starts at second 1 instead of 0, therefore creating a 46 second clip.

The exported version can be seen in quicktime with a length of 46 seconds, without any extra silence or sound.

GarageBand Shot

In order to create such region, you have to activate the "repeat/loop" (next to the Play button in GarageBand). That will create an extra space below the Beat Bar (where you move the Play Head). When you hover your mouse over that small region, the cursor changes. You can click and "drag" to paint the yellow zone. That's the zone that will be repeated over and over.

Always export with a repeat/loop zone created and Garageband will only export that.

NOTE: Logic Pro/Express behaves the same way when creating bounces.

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Perfect. Thanks! – Nathan Greenstein Mar 17 '11 at 23:56

In further detail, in order to see the cursor change, start at the beginning of the track. In Garageband 11, the loop region icon is located next to the metronome.

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