there you are happily recording or mixing away in garageband
when suddenly without warning this thing
there is nothing worse than being in the zone only to have garageband freeze crash or beach ball on
you it's the worst in this video i'm gonna share four tips that'll help stop it from happening
if you're using a lot of software instrument tracks in a project you may find that garageband
has trouble playing back smoothly or will crash completely depending on your mac's model and
specification rendering all of those instrument sounds in real time can be quite taxing to take
some of the strain off of your machine during software instrument heavy projects lock your
software instrument tracks right or control click on any of your projects track headers and select
configure track header in the menu that pops up you want to check the show track lock box this
will add the track lock icon to all track headers in your project next click the lock icon on all
of the software instrument tracks in your project bearing might know that you won't be able to make
any edits to these tracks once they're locked hit the spacebar when you're done and garageband will
go through the process of freezing these tracks what's happening here is that the locked tracks
are being bounced to an audio file and saved to your garageband project file as an aiff file
this makes them far less taxing to play back and should help keep your project running smoothly
garageband's built in visual eq is fantastic in fact it puts many third-party paid eq plugins to
shame one of its best features is definitely the analyzer which gives you a visual representation
of the frequencies at play in real time if like me you end up using the visual
eq on the vast majority of your tracks it's a good idea to get into the habit of turning off
the analyzer feature once you've finished making eq adjustments in larger projects dozens of these
real-time eq analyzers going at the same time can really bog down your system we're diving into your
max system preferences for this one with a tip that will help those using old-school hard disk
drives or fusion drives in particular open your max system settings menu and head to energy saver
you want to uncheck the put hard disk to sleep when possible box if this is on your hard drive
will go into a kind of idle state after a period of inactivity so if you're mid project and want to
audition a loop for example your hard drive has to be woken up before retrieving the audio file
and then playing it this can take upwards of five seconds or more and you don't want to be staring
at this we every time you change a loop not fun disabling this feature will reduce the likelihood
of you completely losing patience and launching your mac out of the nearest available window
finally and this might sound a little bit obvious but make sure you close all other programs on your
mac when you're recording mixing or mastering in garageband facebook can we just close them
all there are some truly bloated programs out there that can drastically affect the
performance of garageband while you have them open but the main offenders in my experience
anyway are google chrome photoshop slack spotify and bizarrely apple music so make sure you close
everything down before you start making your next killer tune in garageband hopefully the tips in
this video will help keep garageband on your mac running smoothly and stop you ever having to see
this little ever again if you want to dive into even more garageband for mac info click
here to check out my top five tips take care of yourself i'll see you next time bye for now