GarageBand2. The Missing Manual

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10.11. "Bounce Down" Many Tracks into One

And now, one of the most useful and powerful tools in the GarageBand musician's arsenal. It involves exporting several tracks, or even all of your tracks, and boiling them all down into one.

Suppose, for example, that your Mac can play only five tracks at once before bogging down. However, you've got 20 tracks' worth of music in your head! Using the "bounce down" trick, that's no problem. You could simply proceed as shown in Figure 10-5.

Here's the step-by-step version:

  • Export all five tracks to iTunes (Figure 10-5, top). Reimport the result into GarageBand as one track (Figure 10-5, middle and bottom). Delete the original five component tracks, or just mute them. Now you're free to add another four! (Effective total now: nine tracks.)

  • Export these five tracks (which sound like nine) to iTunes. Reimport into GarageBand as one track, delete the original fiveand add yet another four. (Effective total: 13.)

The one big caution here is that each time you export your tracks, you're freezing them. You're giving up any ability to adjust their effects, rebalance their volume levels, change the song's tempo, and so on. Take care to finalize each semi-mix as much as possible before exporting.

Tip: You might also want to use the File Save As command along the way, preserving each set of exported tracks before you delete them, so you can return to the original GarageBand files if necessary. (Like when you finally get that dual-processor Power Mac G5 with 1 gig of RAM.)

Figure 10-5. Top: A bunch of tracks, just crackling with music. Finalized and polished to within an inch of their life. And pushing the Mac to its max. How will you gain the headroom necessary to add the four vocal tracks you have in mind?

Easyjust export the half-finished mix to iTunes, and then delete the tracks from GarageBand.

Bottom: Then bring it all right back in as a single track, as shown here. Now you've got a nearly empty track canvas in which to add four more tracks.

You've just created what studio musicians call a submix.

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