garageband loops - quality too high?

[realityisterror]

i was fiddling around with the structure of my hard drive and decided to look at the gb loops. i have garageband and jampack which in total is 3152 loops. that comes out to about .99 MB a pop. just for comparison, the average file size for an m4a in my library is 3.8MB. that's insane! these loops are about 8 measures each and they are a fourth the size of a full song! anyone else that they should be lower quality or maybe mp3/aac??

reality

 

[WinterMute]

Not if you want any kind of parity and interface with Pro packages...

The file of choice in Logic, ProTools etc is .aiff, (or .wav, the same but for headers) an equivalent to CD quality in all repects, including the 1440kbs data rate, I personally want to be able to export tracks from GB and throw them directly into ProTools, sure, Apple could have used AAC, but it wouldn't have been half the package it is.

Be thankful you're not importing the Vienna Orchestra library, I'm up to 60Gig and counting, I had to go buy a new drive just to hold my sample library...

The GB library with all the Soundtrack loops installed (plus a few others) goes just under 6Gigs, quality and choice is what it's all about, it's also why we have 250 Gig FW800 drives.

 

[crenz]

I would have been quite willing to sacrifice the extra disk space for loops in higher quality (e.g. 48Khz/24 bits), actually. The current format is a compromise; using AAC would mean to loose too much quality.