Logic Express takes 4-6 hours to load a Garageband project!??!!

Question

When I open projects I have made with Garage Band in Logic Express, it takes 4-6 hours to load the song. Thats obviously not the way it is supposed to be.
On another machine I have Logic Pro. There opening a Garageband project is fast -30 sec or so.
Maybe I am crying for help? Or maybe there is something wrong with the software?
I have all my Garageband instruments on the startup volume, while I have most of my loops on another volume. That works just fine with Garageband. It also works fine with Logic Pro under 10.3.9.
The Garageband loops are on an external USB disk, and this hard disk is spinning constantly during those hours. Logic Express puts up messages like "Loading Audio Files for "Cellos.exs"" during this time. Incidentally Logic Express is not responding during this time, The above dialog say one can press command period to cancel the operation, but that does not work. All that is working is killing the application process.
The above behaviour occurs wether I have any loops in the project or not.
Is there a solution to this? Having all loops on the startup volume is not possible.

Answer 1

Thank you very much 'Windham Hillbilly'.
Yes, saving the song as an archive from GarageBand gives fast loading in Logic Express, fully comparable to my Logic Pro loading of non archive songs.
So, this takes care of the issue for me.
Now, if there really should be a 4-6 hour load time in the first place is a different matter.