Running Plug-ins From External Drive, Running Plug-Ins from External Drive Options

[lukamaki]

Prolly an idiotic question, but how can one run RTAS plug-ins from an external drive? I've been trying to find this info out from the ProStools LE documentation and have had no luck... I know it's just a matter of getting the DAE to recognize that the plug-in folder is in a different location, but I'm not sure of the best (and least problematic) way of doing this...

Any help out there?

Thanks.

Bob

[td3k]

Have you tried creating an alias of the plug-ins directory on the ext. drive? Try placing an alias to the plugins directory, in /Library/Application Support/Digidesign/Plug-Ins. Or maybe replace the ..Plug-Ins dir w/ the alias and name it "Plug-Ins". Just out of curiosity, why are we doing this?

TD

[lukamaki]

I am under the (possibly erroneous) assumption that by putting not only audio files, but also plug-ins, on an external drive will help improve performance of ProTools on my 900mHz iBook G3 (in addition to all the other usual tips re: CPU load).

Perhaps this assumption is a figment of my imagination, or that I misread something somewhere down the line regarding this issue...

Thanks for the suggestion!

Bob

[PristineRec]

Yes, that assumption is erroneous. I think it's been confusing for a lot of people.

What you want to do is install Pro Tools on your internal startup drive, leaving all of its plugins and supporting files and libraries and whatever else where the installer puts them.

When you create a new session for recording, save it into a folder on your external firewire drive. Pro Tools should by default record all of it's tracks into the audio files folder that it creates in the folder for that session. This means everything you record will be saved on your firewire drive, as well as everything that it plays back.

This way, ProTools and all system-related processes are running on your internal hard drive, while all audio files are written adn read from your firewire drive, allowing both drives to share the work load.

Make sense?