Exporting and Sharing Your Finished Song

You've recorded, arranged, and balanced a project — now let's turn it into a single file you can actually send to someone, upload, or play on any device.

Finish the project first

Before exporting: mute or delete anything you don't want included (like a scratch guide vocal), and check that your song starts and ends where you expect — including any natural fade-out or silence at the end. Play through the whole thing once, start to finish, without stopping.

Exporting from GarageBand

Use Share > Export Song to Disk (in some versions this is under File > Export, or File > Share). GarageBand offers a few quality/format presets — for most purposes, a high-quality setting is the right call, since you can always compress a high-quality master down later, but you can't recover quality lost from exporting too small the first time.

Choosing a file format

• WAV or AIFF — uncompressed, full quality, larger file size. Best if you're sending the track for further mixing/mastering elsewhere, submitting to a label or distributor, or just archiving your best-quality copy.
• MP3 or AAC — compressed, much smaller file size, quality loss that's usually inaudible at higher bitrates. Best for quick sharing, streaming uploads, or anywhere file size matters more than absolute fidelity.

A sensible habit: export one high-quality WAV as your master copy, then export a compressed MP3/AAC from that if you need something smaller to share quickly.

Where the exported file goes

By default, exports land in your Music folder (often inside a "GarageBand" or similarly named subfolder) unless you choose a different destination during export. Take note of where it saved — it's easy to lose track of an exported file among your other music.

A quick pre-export checklist

• No unintended silence or clipped audio at the very start or end
• Volume levels checked — the master meter shouldn't be hitting the red
• Any reference/guide tracks muted or removed
• File format chosen to match what you're doing with it next

You just finished the Beginner track

That's the full loop: interface, recording, editing, loops and drums, mixing, and exporting. From here, the Intermediate track picks up with the tools that make a good project sound like a genuinely polished one — MIDI editing, Flex Time and Flex Pitch, effects, and arranging a complete song structure.