Apr 20, 2017 I want to export a midi track from garage band into a MIDI file. I've created a track using garageband. I have tried everything but buying logic pro, and honestly I think it is a bit waste of money if I'm only going to use it once to export a file into a readable midi format. A stereo audio file is saved to the GarageBand File Transfer folder. Connect your iPad to your Mac. Your connected iPad appears in a Finder window sidebar under Locations. On your Mac, select the icon for your iPad, click Files, then click the disclosure triangle for GarageBand in the Apps list. The GarageBand File Transfer folder appears. IOS GarageBand: Exporting Multitrack Files & Converting MIDI to Audio. February 1, 2021. Click image to play video. My previous blog post from 2018 outlines the method I've used to export individual multitrack files from iOS GarageBand. I've recently updated that post (along with its downloadable PDF) for iOS 14.
Why no T-Bone?
Exporting midi from GB on iOS is something heard of lots of people wanting to do, including myself. So I ask, why should it be difficult? Why isn’t a feature?
But since it’s not a feature, why can’t we just reach in and take it for ourselves by force if we must?
I’ve searched the net, maybe I’ve missing it, but I have found any technique yet so let’s take a look at what’s known:
1. We can export an iOS GB project as a “.band” file to anywhere. Google Drive, whatever, using the standard iOS Share feature from within GB.
2. We can change the file extension to from “.band” to “.zip”, and extract the file and folders with a tool like 7-zip, simple one scale project looks like this:
Interesting. Seems to almost make a little sense. So now what? It’s may be a bit wasteful for a project playing a single piano scale to be 1.2MB, but our notes have to be in there somewhere, right?!
A lot of the files are empty placeholders or unhelpful. However, notice there is a file called projectData.
If we open this file it looks like the file below. Getting a bit more interesting now. This looks like a plain ol’ xml file. Moreover it looks to have binary data directly included inside the file, see the <data> tag.
This image is clipped, the data section goes on a long way and probably accounts for a fair chunk of the 1.2MB size of the project.
Too bad that data section doesn’t have text like “You just used a Grand Piano to play the notes C, D, E, F, G, A, B”.
It’s in some kind of binary format Apple has chosen. We have to find a way to make sense of it. It could be fully encrypted, become impractical to see into, and game over folks.
Export Midi File Garageband Ipad Pro
XML Data
However…encrypted files don’t usually look like that. The way encryption works usually requires it be very random looking.
Noticed all the repeated characters? Maybe we’re not dead yet. It’s common for people to put binary data in XML by wrapping the binary data, say an image, in a standard textual encoding format. So we can at least take a shot. Let’s try base64. That gives us a file that look like
Can You Export Garageband As Midi
Looks like we’re still alive! You don’t have to be a developer to guess when you can see “Instrument Names”, we’re not dealing with some some kind of NSA super encryption.
With that layer of the onion peeled back, we still don’t know what it means, and I hate to break the bad news, but I’m new here and know nothing about the midi format details (I plan to look at examples or read the spec when I get a minute). But I’m already pretty sure that ain’t just midi because there’s all sorts of apple specific terms in it.
We can make some observations already. First, see all those scary looking black characters? Don’t be scared of those, that’s the easy part. They’re just control codes when you want to use a character that can’t be seen, but means something like, carriage return or whatever.
Where are we now?
We started playing a single scale in GB iOS 12 latest versions of everything as of today
Then wondered why the heck is there no midi export button?
Export Midi File Garageband Ipad 2
Now we’ve peeled back several layers of a real project, are able to look around inside of it. It doesn’t appear to be encrypted at all and we’re seeing exactly the kind of stuff in the data we’d hope to see.
We can find music related words including “piano” used a bunch of times within this file and data nearby them in sub-sections that could have my scale notes buried in there somewhere.
I wish a had a few minutes to dig further right now but at the moment, I still haven’t hit any wall or seen any reason it shouldn’t be possible to with a little more poking around to get this done.
Interested in any feedback you have:
- Do you agree it might be handy sometimes to have a .band to midi converter? I use other DAWs, some things I just prefer to do in GB iOS.
- Is there already prior art on this effort for iOS, not desktop GB, or a free super utility I’ve missed?
- If you look at the project data, maybe it’s obvious right away to where is is or how they’re storing it. I just ran out of time for but wouldn’t be surprised if others already know more.
Export Midi File Garageband Ipad App
Here’s a link to the decode project text file if anyone wants to take a look: