How to get all the awesome extra sounds for GarageBand 10

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All you need to make some sick beats. Photo: Rob LeFebvre/Cult of Mac
All you need to make some sick beats. Photo: Rob LeFebvre/Cult of Mac

If you dig creating fresh beats and smooth grooves on your Mac, you’ll likely love GarageBand. It’s a fantastic bit of musical creation kit for anyone, regardless of native ability or experience. You can use loops to make new songs, play your own music with MIDI keyboards–even make your own ringtones for your iPhone. It’s quite versatile.

When you download GarageBand from the Mac App Store, you’ll immediately get 50 sounds, 500 loops, 1 drummer, and 2 basic lessons for guitar and piano. Likely, though, you want the full package, which is available as a free download that expands the content to 200 sounds, 2,000 loops, 15 drummers, and 40 basic lessons for guitar and piano.

Here’s how to get it.

Get while the gettin' is good. Photo: Rob LeFebvre/Cult of Mac
Get while the gettin’ is good. Photo: Rob LeFebvre/Cult of Mac

Launch GarageBand and head up to the GarageBand menu, just to the right of the Apple menu. You’ll see Download More Sounds about three items down. Select that and you can choose to download the entire collection.

menu GBIf for some reason (like a failed download etc), you don’t happen see the loops or other content in your GarageBand app, you may need to remind it. Just locate the Restore Sound Library menu item. Choosing that gave me the downloading screen you can see above.

Pro tip: if you have more than one Mac, you can install GarageBand on as many as you like using your Apple ID, and you’ll be able to get the full set of fantastic sounds and loops on your other Mac, too.

The download itself will take a while – even on my super fast home internet, it took around 15 minutes to complete. You can continue to use GarageBand while it’s downloading, however, and if you quit the app, the download will resume when you restart it at a later date.

Happy music making!

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