Monthly Archives: August 2006

Ok, I promised I’d write about how to do this, so here goes…
(also, anything you try in this post is AT YOUR OWN RISK – If you don’t know what you are doing here, DON’T DO IT. If you somehow break your actual copy of GarageBand, I CANNOT fix it for you. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.)

So say you’ve got this fancy-schmancy Intel-based Mac, but a lot of the plugins you use (or want to use) aren’t Universal Binaries yet. What do you do? If you’re running Logic or something along those lines, just do a “Get Info” on the application, and check the “Open using Rosetta” checkbox. No problem.

Now, say you’re like me, running poor little GarageBand 3 – it’s a Universal Binary, so it should open in Rosetta, right? Try it – do a Get Info – the “Open in Rosetta” checkbox isn’t there…

What to do? Luckily, Apple provided the answer here, in the Universal Binary Programming Guidelines. I first tried messing with the application’s Info.plist file, as it contains settings that can prevent/allow the use of Rosetta. Unfortunately, that didn’t help. For some reason, it still never provided the “Open in Rosetta” checkbox.

Time for the serious hack. We’re going to make a separate copy of GarageBand, and strip all the Intel code out of it, leaving only a PowerPC binary that has to run in Rosetta. You’re going to have to run Terminal for this (it’s in /Applications/Utilities, if you don’t have it on your Dock, like I do).

Before you get going in Terminal, you’ll first need to make a copy of the .app. in Finder, go to /Applications, and make a duplicate of GarageBand. you can call it whatever you like, but I called mine GarageBandPPC3. I’ll refer to it as this below.

Now, onto the Terminal work. First, lets actually look at the application itself
in your Terminal window, type
$ cd /Applications/GarageBandPPC3.app/Contents/MacOS/
$ ls -l

you should see three files in there, ChapterTool, GarageBand, and bomread. The only one we’re concerned with is GarageBand. Try this command:
$ file GarageBand
GarageBand: Mach-O universal binary with 2 architectures
GarageBand (for architecture ppc): Mach-O executable ppc
GarageBand (for architecture i386):Mach-O executable i386


from the prompt type these commands in to strip out the Intel code, leaving only the PowerPC version:

$ ditto -arch ppc GarageBand /tmp/GarageBand
$ mv /tmp/GarageBand .


now let’s try seeing what the file is:

$ file GarageBand
GarageBand: Mach-O executable ppc


At this point you should be done. Try running GarageBand3PPC from the finder. Do you see your PowerPC-only AudioUnits? Excellent! Is it running slow as hell? Probably, and there isn’t much I can do about that. Also, anytime Apple updates GarageBand, you’re going to have to do this again to make the PPC-only version match the UB version, unless, of course, the update allows opening in Rosetta

The real solution is to nag plugin vendors to build Universal versions of their AudioUnits (or even open-source them if they don’t want to do it – heck, I’ll give it a try if you’ll let me), but until then, maybe this will help you use the C3 Compressor to master your songs, or use daHornet or the Magical 8-bit plug as instruments in your next hit.