Playing MIDI files on the Mac with Garage Band 10.0.2
GarageBand 10 is vastly different than GB6!
Within Mac OS X 10.9.2 I double click a file ending in “.mid”, in Finder, and GarageBand volunteers to perform it.
But not without some help.
The upside is that you can choose different voices for the separate parts.
- Show MIDI file ending in “.mid” in Finder.
- Double click it. (GarageBand should launch.)
- Click the metronome icon unless you want the metronome.
- Click the start symbol (▷).
Now you should see several green bars stretching across the right of a large window.
I will call them staves here.
Each staff is one of the parts of the music, reminiscent of several staves of a musical score.
There is a right pointing triangle which causes the music to play but perhaps with inappropriate voices.
The small upper-most left-most square leads to a greater selection of voices.
If you select a staff then you are presented at the left with a multi level hierarchy of voices.
There are some nice ones.
One of my MIDI files acquired an “extended attribute” I know not how.
This spooked Garage band which quarantined it by adding yet another attribute.
The shell command:
xattr -p com.apple.quarantine 4-Sarabande.mid:
demonstrated the problem and the following two commands fixed the problem:
xattr -d com.apple.quarantine 4-Sarabande.mid
xattr -d com.apple.ResourceFork 4-Sarabande.mid
2017 July
It seems that Garage Band 11 has forgotten how to play Midi:
QuickTime 10.6.3 which comes free here play midi but too softly.