How to organize GarageBand projects (.band) on Mac, iPhone and iPad

Why GarageBand projects get lost

On the Mac, GarageBand saves each song as a .band package in ~/Music/GarageBand/. On iPhone and iPad, songs live inside the app and sync through iCloud Drive if you let them. Songs get named My Song 14 by default, duplicated when you tap “Share to Mac”, and left behind when a phone is replaced. Five years of humming-into-the-phone ideas end up as a hundred My Song entries nobody can tell apart.

A structure that keeps GarageBand songs findable

1. Rename at the moment you save. My Song 14 is the single biggest cause of lost ideas. Even slow-piano-thing is enough for your memory to hook onto.
2. Pick one home: iCloud Drive or the Mac. Turn on iCloud for GarageBand on iOS and point the Mac at the same GarageBand for iOS folder in iCloud Drive, or export every phone idea to the Mac and treat the Mac as canonical. Mixing the two is how songs go missing.
3. Year folders on the Mac. ~/Music/GarageBand/2026/slow-piano-thing.band. Finder handles the packages fine.
4. Share an audio bounce next to the package. Share → Export Song to Disk as MP3 into the same folder. The bounce survives even if a future GarageBand can’t open the package.
5. Moving up to Logic? Open the .band in Logic Pro and save it as .logicx in your Logic folder — keep the original .band for the record.

What folders can’t tell you

A .band package shows a name and a date. The tempo and key are inside the project data; the melody is in the audio. “The one in G I hummed on the bus last spring” needs both read out.

How MusicCat catalogues GarageBand projects

MusicCat’s desktop client watches your GarageBand folder (local or the iCloud Drive one) and reads every .band package directly. GarageBand and Logic Pro share the same project engine, so MusicCat reads the tempo and track layout from both with the same parser, and finds the key by analysing the exported bounce. Any exported bounce is analysed for energy and danceability, and anything you sang is transcribed into searchable lyrics.

For the ideas that never became a project at all — voice memos, a chorus hummed into the phone — MusicCat has Song Seeds: record straight into the catalogue from your phone’s browser, and the seed gets the same key, tempo and lyric treatment. An AI describes each entry; filter by key, mood or lyric; listen; keep going. Your files stay exactly where they are.