Uninstall / Remove GarageBand on OSX

GarageBand (OS X) could be a great app. Maybe. However, I never use it – and yet it takes valuable space on my SSD. I removed the app by dragging to the Trash, but then later discovered it is far from over yet and I can free much more space.

WARNING While I do hope you would find this info useful, use it with great care.
As with any web page, use it as a guide but not as a substitute for your own brain.
Always know what you are doing.

So, here is list of folders that can be safely deleted if you don’t plan using GarageBand. As usual, run as root:

rm -rf /Applications/GarageBand.app/
rm -rf /Library/Application Support/GarageBand/
rm -rf /Library/Application Support/Logic/
rm -rf /Library/Audio/Apple Loops/
rm -rf /Library/Audio/Apple Loops Index/
rm -rf /Library/Audio/Impulse Responses/

you may want to read notes below before running the following commands:

rm /Library/Receipts/com.apple.pkg.GarageBand_AppStore.bom
rm /Library/Receipts/com.apple.pkg.GarageBand_AppStore.plist
rm /Library/Receipts/com.apple.pkg.MAContent10_GarageBandCoreContent.bom
rm /Library/Receipts/com.apple.pkg.MAContent10_GarageBandCoreContent.plist
rm /Library/Receipts/com.apple.pkg.MAContent10_PremiumPreLoops*

the last command should have deleted 26 files.

If you are pedantic (why would read this page otherwise, lol), then you may want to examine the content of all .bom files under /Library/Receipts/ (before deleting them of course). You can do that using:

cd /Library/Receipts/
lsbom -f com.apple.pkg.GarageBand_AppStore.bom | more

that may give you good indication of where else it stores its files.

Additionally, I believe you can safely delete application Apple Loops (located under Utilities). I am not sure if /Library/Application Support/iLifeMediaBrowser/Plug-Ins/iLMBGarageBandPlugin.ilmbplugin needs to be deleted or it’s better to leave it. Finally, /Library/Preferences/ can be checked for any preference files saved by GarageBand.

I had to remove this wonderful application from several machines. While I managed to free 2.33 Gb only on the first machine, another machine had 30 Gb added to free space. Definitely worth checking.

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