So you were in GarageBand recording a podcast or an extremely long song, and you noticed that GarageBand stopped at 999 measures. Yup, that’s right… the new version of GarageBand will only record about 33 minutes at 120 tempo. Apple has recognized this as an issue, and officially stated that there is no work-around. You can always change the tempo to 60, but then you soooouuuunnnddd rrreeeeaaaallll ssssllllllooooowww. That’s no good. You could have started out at 60 and been fine, but since your here, I’ll assume you didn’t know about this until you started recording. Lucky for you this happened to me just two weeks ago, and I, being the brilliant person that I am, discovered a work-around.

During the latest recording of my podcast The Fantasy Football Guys (redesign coming. no comments please !) My associate and I decided to use GarageBand for reasons to be described in a later post. Much to our dismay, the friggin program stopped at 33 minutes. Not noticing right away, we recorded about 4 minutes more of audio.

After realizing the error we stopped, and a funny thing happened. While listening to the end, to our amazement, GarageBand had in fact, recorded the additional 4 minutes. We had lost nothing, but we could not see it.

We decided to keep recording.

Once finished, I went through about 4 hours of the worst kind of troubleshooting that I will not bore you with. Needless to say, I fixed the problem. The following is a detailed description of those steps. It is absolutely recoverable. Hopefully, if this has happened to you, these steps will ease the pain a little.

The GarageBand 999 Measures Work-Around

1. Freak Out !!! Okay, now calm down… We can fix this!
2. Keep Recording - If you stop, that’s fine. You’ll just have to start again at 999 measures. Or start a new podcast either way, we’ll combine it all later.
3. Make a Copy - when you are finished recording
4. If you kept recording all the way through, go into the track editor (scissor squiggly line icon) and make a break in the track(s) at the very end.
5. Move the data from 0 - 999 measures to a new track(s).
6. Move the data that’s left (you’ll barely be able to see it at the end of your original tracks) to the beginning.
7. Now, you should have 2 tracks for each input. (2 Mics = 4 tracks)
8. Save your copy.
9. Take a break! At this point, we’re about half way done. The interesting thing here is that lowering the tempo, as I mentioned before, will make the tracks sound very slow. However, modifying the tempo doesn’t seem to affect imported data. Hmmmm.. on to step 10.
10. Export each individual track to iTunes. Mute all other tracks (by clicking the speaker icon under the track name)
11. Now you should have multiple files in iTunes (probably all having the same name), doesn’t matter, we’re gonna put them back in GarageBand right now.
12. Start an new song in GarageBand and change the Tempo to 60 or 30 (just click on the 120 in the window, you’ll get a slider).
13. Drag your files from itunes right on to your new GarageBand tracks.
14. Put the tracks you cut earlier right up against one another.
15. Save and Re-export to iTunes… There you go… Fixed just like new !!!

I know this can seem a bit tedious, but well worth it to save that podcast or really long song! Next time, start your recording with lower tempo, and you’ll never have to worry about this again!