Putting BIAB on an External Hard Drive

jolynyk · Post by **jolynyk** » 3 Jul 2010 3:48 pm

I have an empty 250 gig external Hard drive. I also have BIAB 2009, real tracks 1-39, & real drums 1-20,
Can I put it all onto the External HD & have it similar to the one I would buy from PGMusic.. Then would I just be able to erase everything off my computer??
Would BIAB just come up when I would plug my External drive into my computer??
thanks in advance.

David Collins · Post by **David Collins** » 3 Jul 2010 5:55 pm

I have done this and it works just fine for me. Others here probably have more experience with external drives and BIAB.

Best of luck to you.

jolynyk · Post by **jolynyk** » 4 Jul 2010 6:08 am

thanks David.. Do you have to load it from your C drive, or does it load from your external drive.?
John

Rick Campbell · Post by **Rick Campbell** » 4 Jul 2010 6:52 am

John,

You have to install it on you external drive, then when you want to run it, you have to find the file "bb.exe" and double click on it. You can always put a shortcut on your desktop that will point to the external drive and run BIAB.

jolynyk · Post by **jolynyk** » 4 Jul 2010 5:17 pm

Great thanks, then I can remove all BIAB on my C drive & on my F drive.. that should give me a lot more room..Rick am enjoying your DVD
John

Terry Niendorf · Post by **Terry Niendorf** » 5 Jul 2010 11:32 am

Good stuff. OK here's my question. Is there a way to load everything on the external drive and then unzip the real tracks and keep them unzipped? I quit using the real tracks from most everything cause I can't live with the constant re-loading times. Also, any idea how big(in gigs)the real tracks 1-39 is?

jolynyk · Post by **jolynyk** » 5 Jul 2010 1:26 pm

Golly, I haven't done the Real Tracks yet. Maybe Rick or someone can chime in, cause that was going to be my next step.. I would say that must be possible. I think PG Music ship their USB drives with everything on it.

Stuart Legg · Post by **Stuart Legg** » 18 Jul 2010 10:27 pm

Yeah you can unzip them in your external drive but you will need a drive with terabytes of memory.
Things work much better if you load bb in your computer and run the real tracks from your external hard drive and keep the saved files on your computer.
This does not eat up a lot of your internal hard drive memory and doesn't clutter your external drive with things other than the program.

Carl Kilmer · Post by **Carl Kilmer** » 19 Jul 2010 5:11 am

I have BIAB 2010.5 and bought a Seagate FreeAgent 320GB
portable USB drive that is big enough for everything.
You can put everything on your 250GB drive and then put
a shortcut on the desktop to open it. Then you can delete all
of the BIAB files from your c: drive.

Rick Campbell · Post by **Rick Campbell** » 19 Jul 2010 7:10 pm

PG Music sells the entire BIAB program, Real Tracks, etc... all installed on a 160 GB portable hard drive. No terabytes needed.

Bo Legg · Post by **Bo Legg** » 31 Jul 2010 2:23 pm

Sure you can upload the verythingPAK to a 160GB USB Hard Drive.
but if you want speed your going to have to have the files already unzipped in your hard drive and that takes TBs.
The 2010.5 Audiophile Edition takes a 1.5TB USB Hard drive.
The 2009.5 Audiophile Edition takes a 1 TB USB Hard drive.
The Audiophile Editions load the song and changes much faster.
I still think you'll find that having just bb on your C drive and the rest on the external hard drive is easier to manage your files from your computer desktop.

Rick Campbell · Post by **Rick Campbell** » 31 Jul 2010 3:40 pm

Bo Legg wrote:Sure you can upload the verythingPAK to a 160GB USB Hard Drive.
but if you want speed your going to have to have the files already unzipped in your hard drive and that takes TBs.
The 2010.5 Audiophile Edition takes a 1.5TB USB Hard drive.
The 2009.5 Audiophile Edition takes a 1 TB USB Hard drive.
The Audiophile Editions load the song and changes much faster.
I still think you'll find that having just bb on your C drive and the rest on the external hard drive is easier to manage your files from your computer desktop.

What you say is accurate but somewhat misleading, in my opinion. To explain: The audiophile version of BIAB contains the original uncompressed WAV files. The difference in sound would not be noticeable except under the most expensive equipment and in a controlled commercial setting. In my opinion, and I've done a lot of BIAB research, the audiophile version would be an overkill for all the BIAB users I've ever encountered.

Having said this, it is true that the audiophile uncompressed files do generate the song faster than the regular versions. However, this was greatly improved with version 2010 of the regular versions and is not really an issue any longer, in my opinion.

If one wants to spend the extra money for the audiophile version of BIAB, that's their decision, but I don't think the average listener would notice the difference.

I say this because I don't think it's accurate to leave people with the impression that they're missing out on something really fantastic because they don't own the audiophile version of BIAB. Rest assured, you'll do just fine with the regular versions and decent synths and playback equipment.