How do I remove GarageBand?

Question

I'm nearly out of space and ~/Library/Application Support/GarageBand is taking up 1.5 GB and GarageBand.app is taking up 381 MB of my hard disk space.

Can I simply remove the app itself and this folder to remove it from my system?

Answer 1

Yup, if you no longer want it on your system, those are the two biggest offenders in terms of size. To be completely thorough, have a look through ~/Library/Preferences/ for the .plist file and trash that too.

If you're on a purge, it may be worth looking at iMovie/iDVD too if you don't use those.

Answer 2

Yes, you can remove /Applications/GarageBand.app and ~/Library/Application Support/GarageBand from your system. In case you are wondering if other files related to GarageBand are remaining, you can get a listing of all files installed by GarageBand by issuing the following command:

$ lsbom /Library/Receipts/boms/com.apple.pkg.GarageBand51.bom

lsbom provides access to the package receipt giving full details of what was installed and where.

Also check for preference .plist files in:

$ ls -l ~/Library/Preferences/*garage* 

Hope this helps.

Answer 3

Yup, no issues, one of the first things I did when I got my Mac.

There may be some plists stored elsewhere, but they will be small in comparison to all the instruments, songs and samples in the Application Support directory.

Answer 4

If you are like me wanting to move GarageBand elsewhere such as a backup harddrive then

$ mkdir -p /Volumes/DEVELOPMENT/BACKUP/Library/Application\ Support/
$ mv ~/Library/Application\ Support/GarageBand/ /Volumes/DEVELOPMENT/BACKUP/Library/Application\ Support/
$ mkdir /Volumes/DEVELOPMENT/BACKUP/Applications/
$ mv /Applications/GarageBand.app /Volumes/DEVELOPMENT/BACKUP/Applications/

then if you want to get the Garageband back when you have a larger harddrive, you do the inverse

$ mv /Volumes/DEVELOPMENT/BACKUP/Library/Application\ Support/GarageBand/ ~/Library/Application\ Support/ 
$ mv /Volumes/DEVELOPMENT/BACKUP/Applications/GarageBand.app /Applications/

You need to run some commands as sudo like $ sudo mv....