GarageBand Audio Editing Basics

GarageBand is a complex app with a lot of functionality, but you can use it just to trim, merge and mix simple audio files. Also learn how to add a fade out and filter before exporting.

Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let's take a look at editing audio in GarageBand. 
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So GarageBand is a great free app from Apple that you could use to make music. You could record an instrument, you could build your own music track, loop things, add drums, and all of that. But you could also use it just to edit audio. So if you have an audio file and you need to trim it or you need to merge two audio files or maybe mix two different audio files together you could easily do that in GarageBand as well.
Starting off here in GarageBand when you create a new empty project it's going to ask you to put a track in there. Since we're going to be working with plain regular audio we want to use this track here with the microphone. It's a regular audio track. So we'll create this new document here and we can see here is that track that was created. We can see some settings down below. We can see a library here on the left. We can close that to give ourselves a little more space here. There are various other things. In order to work with audio in GarageBand you don't open the audio file. GarageBand has to work with a GarageBand project. So you want to create one of these projects then bring the audio in. 
Let's prepare a little bit first. The first thing we want to do is turn off the metronome here and the Count-in. We don't need those for this kind of project. Also click here and change from using Beats to using Time which is more applicable when just editing audio files. Now to bring in the audio all we need to do is Drag and Drop. So behind this GarageBand window I've got a Finder window with some audio files. I can take one of those and drag it in and put it right here at the beginning of this first sound track. This is just some spoken audio (Hi, this is Gary and this is my show all about wombats). So we can play to hear any portion of it. We can move the playback head anywhere we want and continue playing (later on I'm going to interview a wom). So now if we want to actually want to trim some off the end, like let's say we just want to keep this section here, and kind of trim it at this point we can do it one of a couple ways. 
One way is we can move the cursor to the end of the track. When you do notice that there are two portions there. The upper portion and the lower portion. The upper portion deals with loops which is something you would use if you're making music. In this case we just want to trim this plain audio. So we want to use the lower portion here which is the end of the track. We can click and drag that in to cut-off everything after that. You could easily expand it back again or move it to change it if you want. The audio doesn't go away. As a matter of fact it stays there. If I were to Save this as a GarageBand project that track would continue to have that extra audio in. Now if we were to export this from GarageBand now we would get this audio and it would stop here except that it would continue to play lots of silence because the track is actually longer than the 20 seconds here. If we scroll over we could see that this is the end of the track past the one minute mark. So I want to drag that in and place that close to the end of the track maybe with a little bit of extra silence at the end. So that's now the length of the track and now I can export this as a new audio file that's trimmed missing the end there. In a few minutes we'll take a look at exactly how to export. But first let's look at some other things that we can do.
What if I wanted to put another audio track, merge two audio tracks together. Well, I can drag and drop a second track, let's do this one, and I can put it in another track by itself. But in this case I'm going to put it after the first track, like that. So now I've got this first bit here, and it's been trimmed. Then some silence and then starts this next piece. So I can adjust this as I like to get the pause just right. So I can adjust this maybe a little less there. I could also trim this track as well. You could see here the end of the track is moved because it needed to make space. Let's move that in. So now I've taken two pieces of audio and placed them together. When I export it's just going to be one audio file with both of these things in it. 
Now what if we wanted to mix things. So actually have two sounds playing at the same time. You may have noticed I've got a little song here and I could drag that in. But instead of into this track I'm going to drag it down below and add it as a second track. This is some music. So now when I play, and I'll move the playback head all the way to the beginning, it's going to play both the audio spoken here and the music. Now you could include as many tracks as you want. So I could add a third or fourth for instance. One thing you may want to do is lower the volume of one of these tracks to get the mix just right. So you can see here on the left I've got volume controls and we can lower the volume down for the song here so that the audio is predominate and the music is just in the background. We can test that out (playing audio). Now this song is really long here so we want to trim that as well. So let's bring the end in here and scroll over. Bring it so it's right about there. Maybe have the music continue a little bit longer afterwards. Then let's bring the end of the track in, something you're going to be doing a lot. Once you have the end of the track right about there now we've got some spoken audio and some music in the background set at a good volume. One thing we may want to do is have the music fadeout. 
You can do that by viewing Automations. Automations will allow you to change the volume over a period of time. That's why it's automation. It's an automatic change of volume. So we go to Mix, Show Automations. It's going to show us the automation for each of these. In this case Volume. If you look closely here there's a yellow line. If I select this track instead you can see this yellow line appears here. This is the volume level because remember this line was lower than this. I can click in here to create a point and then another point and then have it change between them. So I can go to about here, click for one point, click here for another point, then I could click and drag this point down. Now the volume will decrease starting here. So we'll get a fadeout with the music. Now there's a quick way to do that since fadeout is do common. You go to Mix, Create Volume Fadeout on main output. When I do that you get this master track here. I could actually Hide or Show the master track which allows you to set an Automation like this but that covers all the tracks instead of just this one. So you can see here it does a fadeout over several different points here at the end. I don't want to do that here. I've already created my own fadeout so I'll Undo and I'll Hide the master track.
So now that we've done all of that it's time to Export this. We can double check again to make sure the end of the track is here so there won't be a lot of silence there. We've got a good volume level set here. Notice the volume looks smaller there. If I drag this over the volume level will change depending upon where I'm at because I have that fadeout. One thing to keep in mind is that you can use this control here to Zoom in or out. See more or less of what  you're woking with which will help in setting all of this up. Now let's Export. 
So to Export all you need to do is go to Share and then use Export Song to Disc. Here we can select what type of file to use. So AAC is a really good standard to use. You can set it to four different quality levels. You can go to MP3 if that's a requirement for whatever it is you're doing. Or use the AIFF or Wave file format. I'll just stick with AAC. I'll go to the highest quality there. I'll give it a name and I'll set it to this directory that I was using before and export it out. You can see the progress shown right there by the playback head. Let's hide GarageBand. Now we can see there is the new file there and it's a combination of all three of these. (playing audio)   
I just want to show you a few more tips. I told you before that you could trim the end of a track by grabbing it like that. You could also move the Playback head to a certain point and then if you go to Edit, and you see Split Regions of Playhead, which is Command T, so you can do Command T to split this up. So this allows you then to move this piece somewhere else if you want or simply just delete it. So that could sometimes be a faster way to trim things than actually dragging from the end. It's also a really good way to get rid of things at the beginning. So I could have selected this one and gotten rid of it. You could also go, here's the beginning, and trim off the beginning as well. Then perhaps move this over to fit. 
Now maybe while you're working on the spoken audio here you would maybe want to silence the music so you could mute a track that way. Or, alternatively, you could click the headphones here and that solos the track. In other words all other tracks are muted except the ones with this turned on. Also, one of the things you may want to do is filter. So let's filter these two pieces of audio here. I'm going to Shift Click to select both of them. Let me go back to the Library here and you're going to see filters here in the Library because I have a regular audio track selected. I could go to Voice and I can change the voice here. What's  useful for choosing one of these is to set the cycle to On. This will give you this little piece here and it will just keep looping through this. So as I play this will just loop and then i can try some of these different things. Notice all of these controls here will change as I pick different filters. (playing many audios with filters). 
I think the narration vocal  probably works best for this. Now when I export it will have that narration vocal filter applied to this track. So you can see it's fairly simple to actually edit audio in GarageBand. A lot of people are intimidated by GarageBand because there's so much you can do in it. But if you just want to stick to basic audio tracks, trimming things, putting in maybe two tracks into a mix and changing the volume for one, some simple fadeouts, and some filters it's actually fairly simple to use. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 7 Responses to “GarageBand Audio Editing Basics”

Vic

3 years ago

Just some short praise, Gary. You are so terrific at explaining just the basics to get us started. You teach in sequence, with simpler ideas first and complex ones later. Excellent training. Thanks.

Gary Rosenzweig

Vic: Thanks!

Louise

I love GarageBand. Years ago when they had the Podcast version I was able to use slides to act as markers to go with the audio. Now you can use iMovie in much the same way. However, to add richness to the audio, GarageBand has it way over iMovie. I often create my script in GarageBand, record the narration, add layers of music and sound effects and then save the audio to import into iMovie. In iMovie I can adjust the slides to fit the audio. Thanks Gary for explaining the parts in GB.

Jasper

Hi Gary—I have some GB projects from 2017 that won’t open. They have the .band extension and I can tap Previews to see their structure, but that’s it. Have you any advice? I’m guessing that nothing can be done without reverting to the GB version that they were created in &/or the macOS of that vintage.

Jasper: Doesn't matter when the projects were created, but which version of GarageBand you were using at the time. There was a major change in October 2013, but you could have still been using that old version in 2017. So what happens when you try to open the file, exactly? Is there a message?

Ed Mullery

Hi Gary. I have an mp3 file made from an old audio cassette. It has three separate audio recordings in it. Call them speech A, speech B, and song C. (They were on the cassette and were created consecutively on the mp3.)

I would like to separate the contents of this one mp3 file and create 3 files: speech A.mp3, speech B.mp3, and song C.mp3.

Would GarageBand be the best application to do this separation? Or something like the free Audacity? I have no experience with either. Thanks!!

Ed: For something that simple, just use QuickTime player. See https://macmost.com/easily-trimming-video-files-with-quicktime-player.html

Comments Closed.

GarageBand Audio Editing Basics

Comments: 7 Responses to “GarageBand Audio Editing Basics”

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