Procrastination...

[BobCarter]

Being the absent-minded person that I am, I have come across a slight problem I should have predicted, that could potentially cripple my progress. My computer's HD is almost completely full, I have about 20 gig's left to work with but about 100 of them are taken up by my numerous samples, mp3s, vsts, wav files, etc. My goal is to somehow take the numerous vst's that are installed on this computer and reinstall them through the external HD.

My question is: What's the easiest and safest way to transfer my vsts and other installed programs to the external HD? I don't have the original installation CD's for any of my vsts and I really don't want to have to re-scour the internet and my wallet to replace them. Have any of you guys had experience with this dilemma, and do any of have any suggestions on how to do this the right way?

Thanks for reading and hopefully, some feedback in the near future

-bob

 

[MagnaOpera]

Ok well first, peep this: 1 TB USB Harddrive ($139.99).

Now, I would think that you could just drag and drop all your VSTs and VSTIs to the external HD, being that most VSTs and VSTIs I've seen are .dll files (which really don't require installation- the ones that do I think are only installing for stand-alone usage). As for programs, I think that you'd probably have to reinstall them to the external HD, but I've never really tried re-locating a program before.

However, this presents another problem- being that you posted this in the FL Studio forum, I assume that's your DAW of choice- I cannot tell you how to link the VSTs up to FL Studio once they are in the external drive. Being that FL scans a specific folder ("Plugins") to get a list of all the VSTs, I would think that you'd have a hard time getting all the VSTs to even show up in FL. That being said, I think there is some way to "link" folders together (eg. C:\PLUGINS would be linked to D:\VSTS - where C:\ is the drive on your computer, and D:\ is the external).

Basically, what I would do is actaully just transfer all my samples/audio/completed .FLS projects to the external drive, and use my computer's drive for programs, vsts and current projects. Ya dig?

Good luck though.

 

[BobCarter]

yeah my bad I should have said I used FL...thats the reason this was in this sub-section...but yeah I was worried about losing Trilogy and Atmosphere...I also installed Absynth...if these files are workable just by the .dll files then I'm straight...i just wasnt sure...and as for the plug-ins folder... I think you can toggle it to connect to an external drive, I guess if the drive wasn't hooked up when FL is open once I switch over, the worst thing that could happen would my channel buttons being colored "red" and me having manually go and reroute the vsts and wav files to their appropriate directories. The 1 TB external HD is huge....wow coming from starting on a computer with a max space of 3 gig's then to this one, which i thought was big enough, and now a TB is becoming/has become the standard with these drives...man...technology is getting crazy

 

[MagnaOpera]

yeah my bad I should have said I used FL...thats the reason this was in this sub-section...but yeah I was worried about losing Trilogy and Atmosphere...I also installed Absynth...if these files are workable just by the .dll files then I'm straight...i just wasnt sure...and as for the plug-ins folder... I think you can toggle it to connect to an external drive, I guess if the drive wasn't hooked up when FL is open once I switch over, the worst thing that could happen would my channel buttons being colored "red" and me having manually go and reroute the vsts and wav files to their appropriate directories. The 1 TB external HD is huge....wow coming from starting on a computer with a max space of 3 gig's then to this one, which i thought was big enough, and now a TB is becoming/has become the standard with these drives...man...technology is getting crazy

Yeah man, I would just go snoop around in the plugin folders for Absynth, Atmosphere and Trilogy just to make sure.

I remember back in elementary school the computers had like 256mb memory or something lol. we sure have come a long way.

 

[RigorMortis]

Basically, what I would do is actaully just transfer all my samples/audio/completed .FLS projects to the external drive, and use my computer's drive for programs, vsts and current projects. Ya dig?

Good luck though.

I would save them as a zip and not as .fls cos then when samples of the beat get scattered or get lost you have a problem with .fls. Save in zip.

 

[MagnaOpera]

I would save them as a zip and not as .fls cos then when samples of the beat get scattered or get lost you have a problem with .fls. Save in zip.

good call I was sorta worndering what that zip option was for. Thanks for enlightening me.

 

[divineaspex]

why dont you just transfer the audio files to the external HD

 

[MagnaOpera]

why dont you just transfer the audio files to the external HD

dude that is what I said too.

 

[Relic]

One thing I noticed tho is that FL wont go looking for the files that you have in songs already completed..
Why not transfer the whole shabang over to the External?

 

[BobCarter]

haha i might just do that..

 

[djjumpinjoe]

why dont u just install another harddrive in ur computer and transfer the sounds to the new HD and then in ur files setting in Fruity just change the drives and everything will find it self ...... External drive slows down the time to search for sounds .... Even if its 3 or 5 more seconds to open a folder over time that slows down production ..... I always have 2 500 gig HD's and partition them each 4 or 5 times and have my OS on a 10 gig partition so when i wana reinstall XP i dont have to save my sounds or move them .... Once i reinstall XP i just install my programs and everything is still where it is suppose to be .... The vst's might only be DLL's but i still think they have a reg key .... So u prob wont want to move those

 

[BobCarter]

Thanks for the tip, joe (and your massive drum library you posted a few days ago)

 

[RigorMortis]

good call I was sorta worndering what that zip option was for. Thanks for enlightening me.

when you save in flp. it only saves the settings of the project (flp) not the samples
when you save in zip it saves the flp and the samples into the zip.

fruity 101, learning the hard way is a pain in the ass...

 

[thedreampolice]

I was going to reply to this, but I did not get around to it.

 

[MagnaOpera]

^ LOL

when you save in flp. it only saves the settings of the project (flp) not the samples
when you save in zip it saves the flp and the samples into the zip.

fruity 101, learning the hard way is a pain in the ass...

werd.

I would also think that recording audio to a USB drive (if, say you were going to move the whole shebang to the external HD) would pose some sort of a problem... with latency? I know that writing to an internal drive (or accessing said drive) is MUCH faster than going all the way out of the computer via USB to an external drive. I think?

I'm just about to switch my whole operation to another computer, and because of the age of the computer (... it's newer than the one I'm using lool) there are insane limits on HD space (60gb max, some weird proprietary shit that Dell does with its PCs) I'm planning on using an external drive to store all completed projects on. I was thinking I'd use the internal for my programs/current projects. I was either going to store my samples on thumb drives (they're up to 64+ GB!!!!! now, I think that flash memory is MUCH faster to access and write to than a harddrive), backing up all samples to the external.

In this way I think that I can kind of do a categorical thing with my samples, have a thumb drive for dif instruments/genres/whatever.