Use Garage Band Library on Pro Tools

[ReynaldoPena]

Hello everyone,

Hope you guys have all been practicing some social distancing or what have you. I want to use the library I saved/favorited using Garage Band, on Pro Tools. Is this possible? Thanks and any help would be greatly appreciated.

[Darryl Ramm]

It's not clear how you expect this to work. What do you mean by library? You could be referring to audio sample loops, virtual instruments?, or more that are parts of Garageband libraries.

But assuming the simple case of Loops, they are stored in .caf (Core Audio) format and you could use a third party tool to convert them to a format playable in Pro Tools. Some loops are just audio, some MIDI and audio, not sure MIDI only exists. Do you want the raw MIDI or audio? You might be better off if there is a loop/audio sample you like and exporting that song to disk. But even then, once you have an extracted sample it's not going to work the same as Apple Loops, whether audio or MIDI.

And it might or might not be legally OK to repackage Garageband libraries for use in other DAWs, you sure can't redistribute them as is, but the case of own-use is unclear, may run afoul of other clauses in the EULA if you reverse/engineer repackage things. Maybe safest legally to create what you like in Garageband then save song to disk and important that into Pro Tools.

Or find what you are after in the Pro Tools ecosystem? Or just stay working in Garageband or Logic Pro for all or more of the workflow, especially for compositional stuff.

[massivekerry]

You might be able to use Mainstage as a host for your instruments, but I haven’t tried it personally.

[DetroitT]

I use MainStage via IAC bus (core midi) and record the audio analog via another interface (motu 896) into Avid Omni.
$35 for all the Logic Pro VI’s
Footnote
Mainstage /motu is my bootup Piano