I've installed BB on a USB 2 drive a few days ago . It was working OK but now does not want to load . Is it possible to run the program from a USB drive? .....or maybe a USB3 drive?

thanks
Mal

Hi Mal,

Many users run BIAB from USB. In fact, BIAB ships on a USB drive that simply needs setting up to run.

Could you please elaborate a little more on how you installed it?

Also, are you talking about the electronic download? If so, do you have the USB drive coming (it normally takes about 5 days to get to Australia)?

Regards,
Noel

Apologies Noel, I didn't mention it is a USB Flash drive (64 GB as I don't use all the real tracks)

Mal,

Some thoughts that spring to mind...

1. Was this installed by running the BIAB installation program or simply copied from one location to another?

2. Are you using BIAB 2014 or 2015?

3. How many installations have you created? It's only possible to have three installations.

4. Is the reason for using a flash drive to make it portable for a number of computers?

Regards,
Noel

When you mention "it does not want to load" does it show the splash screen, does it lock-up, is there any activity that indicates it is trying to start, or does absolutely nothing happen?
Best
Trevor

1. installed it from the BB installation program
2. 2015
3. only my 2nd
4. the reason is that I have BB on a PG music 160GB drive. I use a laptop on my new grand piano, and trying to cut back on clutter sitting on my brand new Yamaha C3X :-)

It appears the flash drive is not fast enough to consistently open BB, so I'll just use the 160GB portable drive (It slowly tries to open where the splash screen starts to open, then locks up)

Mal,

I might be wrong but it sounds like you might be using Sampletank or some soft synth that is resource hungry on one or more of the tracks. Try the following and see if it makes a difference...

1. Click on the Plugins button then select the option shown below.



2. Click on the individual "Bass", "Piano", "Drums", etc., buttons and make sure that each one is set to "none" from the dropdown menu. (This removes any soft synth set on an individual track.) Exit.



3. Now click on the Prefs button (or select "Opt | Preferences") and then select the "Midi driver" button. Set up numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 as shown in the below image.



4. It would also be a good idea to click on #6 above and set the audio driver to MME if it is set to ASIO.

Try this and see let us know what happens.

Regards,
Noel

• previous song: Just A Little After Midnight

thanks for your tips Noel. I have checked all the settings you mentioned, and nothing seems out of order..
I thin k the problem is that a USB 2 flash drive doesn't have the speed/power to run BB2015
Going back to the 160GB USB hard drive is no problem(apart from clutter on a brand new grand :-))...so I'll take that road

kind regards
Mal

Yes, my experience is that USB 2.0 **Flash** Drives are very slow. There are apparently some that are fast, but any that I've tried have only been about 2-10 MB/second. When BB plays a file, it might access about 24 MB of audio files, so that's up to 12 seconds just to read the data, likely longer.

Newer USB 3.0 Flash drives report 10x faster read speeds (real-world tests have found 3-5X speed increase*), for example this one at 100MB/second.
http://www.amazon.com/Silicon-Power-128GB-Swivel-SP128GBUF3B30V1K/dp/B00JT0E56M/ref=sr_1_13?ie=UTF8&qid=1431970777&sr=8-13&keywords=usb+drive+128+gb

We are testing some of these new flash drives to see if they work well with BiaB. As mentioned, your PC would need to support USB 3.0 for this to work. If someone has one of these fast 3.0 Flash Drives, please let us know their results with using it to run BiaB.

http://www.macworld.com/article/2039427/how-fast-is-usb-3-0-really-.html
*"While you won’t see a tenfold increase in the transfer speed from USB 2.0 to USB 3.0 in real-world use, USB 3.0 is fast—about three times faster than USB 2.0 with a spinning hard drive, and three to five times faster with SSD."

I don't have a big enough USB 3.0 flash drive (yet) to test. However, even though the throughput for USB 3.0 is very fast compared to 2.0, I've noticed a pronounced delay before it starts recognizing the drive on any command (directory or copy). This is peculiar and I would think such a hitch, if it happens to others like it does on my three computers, would affect BIAB.

Thanks for that Peter
Hopefully someone has a large USB 3.0 flash drive they could test BB 2015 with, and report back on here. If successful, I'd buy one for sure

Mal

Matt - Makes me wonder if the latency of the flash drive is because unlike your hard drive, the files are not indexed (and for all I know may be excluded from Windows indexing). And since BIAB has thousands and thousands of files, I could see access being a problem until the files are at least cached.

Hi Mal,

Good news! I installed the BB UltraPak on a USB 3.0 FLASH drive (128GB), and it worked great.
This is the $39 flash drive that I used. http://www.amazon.com/Silicon-Power-128GB-Swivel-SP128GBUF3B30V1K/dp/B00JT0E56M/ref=sr_1_13?ie=UTF8&qid=1431970777&sr=8-13&keywords=usb+drive+128+gb

Bootup time on a MacBookPro (Retina, Mid 2014)/Yosemite machine from the USB Flash Drive was 7.4 seconds - fast!

btw, this was all on a Mac running Mac version of BiaB. We will try it on Windows too.

It took about an hour to copy the whole thing - this was slower than expected, likely because it is creating about 100,000 filenames along the way. That might be related the FAT32, could be faster with native file system (ie Mac file system on a Mac).

So I tried it again, but first formatted it to Mac's native file format (Journaled). And it was much faster to transfer - 3GB/minute from the flash drive, so about 30 minutes to copy it to the Flash drive. The program ran at the same speed, 7 seconds to bootup.

So once transferred, it runs very fast on either formatting (FAT32 or MacJournaled).

So that would be a solution for someone that just wants to keep BiaB on a separate drive, but just wants a small flash drive.

Or you could keep it on a key ring or something.

That's good news. Thanks for that Peter. I will invest in a similar drive
Hopefully this helps others too

regards
Mal

Managed to get an identical flash drive on Ebay (Australia) for $66.90. More than happy with that :-)

thx again Peter

JFord - have a question here. You raise an interesting thought, I usually run my computer with indexing turned off, as I've heard that indexing slows it down. In your experience, does indexing help BIAB load faster?

Jeff

Jeff, very good question; I'd like to know also. I turn off Windows indexing of drives too.

Same here.

But would turning on indexing the drives lead to longer start times for other programs and/or what other problems could occur with other music programs?

I don't know about the loading speed of any programs using indexed files, but indexing does not hurt the programs I have installed. The indexer only creates a reference file collecting the content of your hard drive. The overall advantage of indexing is fast search including text within (text) files.

Actually indexing should not hurt anything, except for some rattle on the hard drive when the indexer is at work. I barely notice it on my fast enough computer.


Since I don't have one yet, I don't know anything regarding SSDs. With the new Samsung 850 PRO and EVO series indexing should not even hurt the expected lifetime of the drive.