01 — The menu path
Share, Export Song to Disk
Go to Share, then Export Song to Disk. A dialogue appears with a filename, a location, and a format choice of AAC, MP3, AIFF or WAVE.
Choose MP3, set the quality, and click Export. That is the whole process.
The other Share options send the project to Music, to a disc, or to Mail. None of them leave you with a file you can upload to a podcast host, which is why Export Song to Disk is the one you want.
Saving the project, Command and S, produces a .band file. That is GarageBand's working format and nothing else opens it. If you have sent someone a .band file they cannot use, this is why.
02 — The usual problem
When the export is shorter than the project
GarageBand exports only up to the end of the project, which is defined by the cycle region if one is active, or by the end marker.
If a yellow cycle bar is showing in the ruler, only that section gets exported. Turn cycle off with C before exporting, unless you deliberately want that section.
If there is no cycle region and the file is still short, the project end marker is sitting before your last audio. Drag it past the end of everything and export again.
This accounts for most cases where an export seems to have gone wrong. Check the length of the file against the length of the project before investigating anything else.
Press C to toggle cycle mode off before every export. It is the single most common cause of a truncated file.
03 — The settings
Quality and what it means for speech
GarageBand offers Good, High and Highest Quality, plus a Custom option that lets you set the bitrate directly.
For spoken audio, 128 kbps is the standard for podcasts and is what most hosts expect. Higher bitrates make the file larger without making a voice sound meaningfully better, because there is far less information in speech than in music.
If your host charges by storage or bandwidth, mono at 96 kbps is a genuine saving for a single-voice episode and nobody will hear the difference.
AAC at the same bitrate sounds better than MP3, but MP3 remains the safest choice for podcast distribution because everything everywhere plays it.
04 — Before you export
The level is baked in
The exported file is as loud as your mix. GarageBand has no loudness target and no LUFS meter, so a project that sounds fine in the room can land noticeably quieter than other shows in a listener's feed.
Podcast platforms normalise to around minus 16 LUFS for stereo. GarageBand cannot measure that, so the practical approach is to get the master level healthy without clipping, then check the exported file in something that can measure it.
Put a Limiter on the master track to catch peaks, and watch the master meter during playback. Red means clipping, and clipping in an export cannot be undone.
Also check the very end for dead air after the last word. Thirty seconds of silence is a common thing to ship without noticing.
Always play the exported MP3 itself before uploading it, not the project. Listen to the first ten seconds and the last ten.
05 — The last mile
Metadata and where the file goes
GarageBand writes basic tags from the project name and your Music account details, which is rarely what you want on a podcast episode.
Most podcast hosts overwrite the tags with what you enter in their interface, so this matters less than it used to. If you are distributing the file directly, edit the tags afterwards with a tag editor.
Name the file something you will recognise in six months. Episode numbers and dates beat titles for finding things later.
If exporting, checking loudness, fixing tags and uploading is a weekly routine, Hilite does all of it in one step and publishes to the platforms directly. We make it, so weigh that as you like.
Correct loudness, tags and distribution
Straight to Spotify and Apple Podcasts without a file to manage.
Export at podcast-ready settings without a dialogue.
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