Saving Garageband to Windows Network Share

[richrogan]

Hi all,

 

I am the new IT manager at a school and have unfortunately been handed the responsibility of the Mac network. Our music department has a suite of Apple Macs which are integrated into our Windows network. They are set up with AD and have file shares dropped down, etc.

 

The company who put the system in place are less than supportive and it is my understanding that the previous employee at this school did most of the Apple server development and integration himself due to the incompetence of the company who sell themselves as "Apple Experts". So as the previous member of staff left, he took all the knowledge with him and the support we have with the company isn't worth using. In addition to this my background is very much Microsoft based and although I'm familiar with Macs and understand the concepts, I can't pretend to be an expert in terms of integrating them within a Windows environemnt.

 

For the most part, the Macs work absolutely fine within our network including network shares and resources. The only problematic issue we have is GarageBand. Now I've been told several times by several people that GarageBand is not designed for network use, however we don't really have a choice with this as the Music department use GarageBand as their software of choice for their classroom material.

 

The software works fine when using it but our issue occurs when trying to save the project. Originally, the pupils were saving the file directly to their user area through GarageBand. The majority of the time, the file would save correctly but then occasionally the project file would not save correctly. To look at the file in the user area it would appear as though it had saved but when we came to trying to open the file it would say incomplete project file. There was no consistency to the saving issue. It would happen on different Macs, different users in different year groups.

 

We were advised to start using Sparse disks but this proved too complicated for the younger pupils.

 

We were then told to save to the desktop and then drag it from there into the user area. We have been doing this since and it has to be said that this did improve the issue but it didn't completely resolve it. Occasionally we still get saving issues when pupils are dragging the file into their user areas. Again, it looks as though it has saved correctly but when we try to open it, it says incomplete file. Fortunately, because they saved it to the desktop, they do have a workable version to go back to. Weirdly, if we try to copy the project file from the desktop to the user area again, chances are it will work. As I say the issue is random and inconsistent but is causing the music department a lot of stress.

 

My question to you all is whether any of you have come across this or a similar issue before? And if so, how did you get round it?

 

Am I heading down a dead end with this? Is it simply because GarageBand is not designed for network use?

 

I think moving forward with this I'm going to have to find another company who can provide expertise and support on this kind of environment because as I say I'm not an Apple expert. Although we have a system in place, none of the current department had any involvement in it's creation and development. So we're going to need a creditable company who can provide a system evaluation and also training.

 

If any of you know of any companies who can provide this then I'm all ears. FYI - We're based in Yorkshire.

 

Any help with this is much appreciated

 

Rich

[3s-gtech]

We use Garageband in the same scenario, saving to the students' Windows based home areas. We don't experience this issue, at least not to my knowledge!

 

What version of OS X are you using? What version of Windows are the home areas hosted on? What permissions do the students have on their home areas? How well are the servers holding home areas coping overall?

[Brimstone]

If you can give us a run down of the following we can try a help. Having said that support for AD network accounts within Mac OS X is at best very sparse with zero support from Apple on this topic.

 

What version of Mac OS are you running?

Do you have a Mac Server? What version of the Server App are you running?

Do you have a .local domain ?

Are the Macs on a subnet of your network?

[Mustang]

How many macs in the music lab?

What model of Mac? and spec?

What version of OS X?

What version of Garageband?

What speed network, link to the Mac, uplinks and Server

What Spec and OS is the server?

[SC2]

I am also an IT Tech in a secondary school and have a Music suite of Mac minis integrated into the AD network and are experiencing a horrible slowdown when student users both access and save their Garageband project files which is reportedly wasting hours of class room time.

Any help with this would be greatly appreciated.

 

Server OS: Yosemite

Mac mini OS: Maverick 10.9.5

Garageband: 10.0.3

[abillybob]

Haven't had any of the issues either? Could you provide more information about your Macs, what OS they're running, what version of Garageband is on them and what server version you're running?

[SC2]

OS & Garageband versions as already posted, Apple Server is approx. 5 years old, Mac minis approx. 2 years old.

[aarongulley]

I am also an IT Tech in a secondary school and have a Music suite of Mac minis integrated into the AD network and are experiencing a horrible slowdown when student users both access and save their Garageband project files which is reportedly wasting hours of class room time.

Any help with this would be greatly appreciated.

 

Server OS: Yosemite

Mac mini OS: Maverick 10.9.5

Garageband: 10.0.3

 

What kind of slowdown are you experiencing?

[Brimstone]

Garageband can save files to network shares but this is all down to your network infastucture. Unlike Windows when users log into the Mac that users entire desktop and files and are being streamed across your network therefore the minimum would be;

 

Gigabit to the desktop for every Mac, anything less than this will give you major issues;

Is the server storage connected via fibre? What is the Mac/Windows server network spec?

 

From your post it looks as though files not completely saved to the server are timing out before saving and therefore missing

 

Here's an example of a secondary school pro media department I work with who use Adobe Premiere across their network, the specs for the server are as follows;

 

Gigabit to the desktop for every Mac

Xserve - four port gigabit ethernet card bonded together for maxumum bandwidth

4 port fibre channel card to SAN for storage

Fibre backbone and L3 switches

 

If you really want do this across the network even a small investment in the infastructure will do wonders

[dannyoneill]

I know this is very old but in case anyone is looking for this: I have the same (original post, not the hijack) issue:

- 32 brand new 2018 Macs on very latest OS

- Gigabit network to fast SAN. Tested and get 90-95MB/s (byte not bit) transfer to the macs, can test that on about 7 macs concurrently before bandwidth starts to fall off. If I do all 32 we get about 35MB/s.

- Those tests are to their network shares which are smbfs mounted shares on a very fast SAN.

 

- Students can all stream music and video (HD) from the network simultaneously with no issues. Can save directly to the shares with Sibelius under all circumstances, including very large (GBs) files at the end of the lessons.

 

HOWEVER, as per OP, our students have the following issue saving with GarageBand:

- they can open from the network drives very quickly

- they can save directly to the network drives very quickly

- EXCEPT AFTER THEY ADD A MUSIC FILE IN GARAGE BAND, and then they cannot save, in fact GarageBand crashes.

- When this happens I test whether the mount is still okay and its fine - I can separately still transfer files to the share. Including very large files.

 

The only work-around we have is to (same as OP) tell students to save to the desktop and then copy the file to the network share separately. It works, but it relies on 11-18 year olds remembering a save and copy procedure they don't normally have to do, this then results in lost work.

 

I have been using network traffic capture software to monitor what GB asks MacOS to do when saving, comparing to the times when you have not added a music track and there ARE marked differences. Haven't had time to analyse fully yet so not sure technically what is happening, but apparently the app does ask for something different in some way and its not just the size of the file, I have tried very large GB saves without imported tracks and they work just fine.

 

No solution, but I have just the same as the OP I think and so I'm sure there are others out there with the same who don't deserve to be placated with "try getting faster switches". This IS a quite genuine and specific issue. I will post back if I discover what is happening.

[richrogan]

Hi Danny,

 

We tried all sorts to get a solution for our students. The save to desktop was the cheapest scenario that worked. We tried saving to the users OneDrive accounts but the files would never save correctly as they would save as individual files rather than project files.

 

We have actually purchased a Showbie license for our Music teachers. Not ideal as it's an extra expense but it has been working perfectly for them and allows the teachers to work collaboratively based on classes etc. It could be worth looking at if you don't get any more joy with the switches, etc.

 

Good luck!

[dannyoneill]

Hi Danny,

 

We tried all sorts to get a solution for our students. The save to desktop was the cheapest scenario that worked. We tried saving to the users OneDrive accounts but the files would never save correctly as they would save as individual files rather than project files.

 

We have actually purchased a Showbie license for our Music teachers. Not ideal as it's an extra expense but it has been working perfectly for them and allows the teachers to work collaboratively based on classes etc. It could be worth looking at if you don't get any more joy with the switches, etc.

 

Good luck!

Thanks Rich, nice to know there are people out there who would bother getting back to others even after years!! I am finding quite a few discussions online about how GarageBand likes to form links to media rather than import it if possible and is causing issues saving to internal drives even in some circumstances. Admittedly a very slightly different issue, but might come down to same root cause. I will experiment with storing our media in different locations prior import to see if that has an effect. By different locations I mean on mounted network shares, via symlinks, more directly with full paths, also from local repositories.

[richrogan]

No problem at all.

 

Let me know how you get on if you manage to make any progress