Where apps hide your files

Music projects on disk

Updated 2026-07-31 · 4 min read

Music apps scatter their weight across three places: projects, sound libraries, and autosaves.

Projects

GarageBand: ~/Music/GarageBand by default — .band packages. Logic Pro: wherever you saved them — .logicx packages, commonly in ~/Music/Logic or a projects folder of your own.

Both are packages: folders posing as files. Audio you recorded lives *inside* the package (unless Logic was told otherwise), which is why a 20-minute podcast edit is a 2 GB "file", and why searching for a bounced clip's name finds nothing — it is inside the project.

The libraries eating your disk

The instruments and loops are the real weight:

/Library/Audio/Apple Loops
/Library/Application Support/GarageBand
/Library/Application Support/Logic
~/Library/Audio/Apple Loops

The Sound Library can exceed 30 GB. Logic can relocate it to an external drive: Logic Pro → Sound Library → Relocate Sound Library — the supported way to reclaim that space.

Finding every project

find ~ \( -name "*.band" -o -name "*.logicx" \) 2>/dev/null -exec du -sh {} \;

Sorted by size, this is also the honest audit of where the space went.

Archiving finished work

Two different needs:

• Bounce (File → Bounce) exports the audio — the thing you keep forever
• The project package is the editable session. For Logic, use File → Save a Copy with

assets included, so the archive does not reference loops that only exist on this Mac

Projects moved to an external drive stop being findable by Spotlight the moment the drive unmounts — an index that remembers offline volumes is what answers "which drive has the stems from 2023" without plugging drives in one by one.

Common questions

Why is my GarageBand file so large?

The .band package contains every recording inside it. Package contents also do not appear in search.

Can I move the Logic Sound Library to an external drive?

Yes — Logic Pro → Sound Library → Relocate Sound Library.