Until recently, I was running BIAB 2021 from an external 1TB hard drive hooked to my laptop but it crashed and I had to reload everything. I decided to go ahead and just load the whole thing on to the internal HD which I did and it works just fine.....but....it took up almost the entire drive - I only have about 3GB left for other things. I mostly use this machine for music but would like to have a little more extra storage for other things. There are many features of BIAB that I just don't use and really have little interest in beyond being able to produce backing tracks for live performance (no offense). Can I get rid of tutorials, ear training, jazz guitar tunes, etc. without messing up the operation of the program and will it get me more space? I've got Reaper, Audacity, Real Band and BIAB on this HD and it's pretty full. I do have another 2TB external drive but would like to keep it for just storage. Tnx

I think the answer is Yes. But have you considered a second internal HD in your desktop? I have three internal HDs and room to add a fourth. And I have a external HD for backups. The external is on a USB 3.1 which provides high speed transfer. This machine is circa 2017 so it was bought for expandibility.

I've got plenty of room on the desk top (about 5 HDs). The problem I have is with the laptop.

I believe if you'll find the extra applications, like ear training, actually don't take up much storage space so deleting them won't give you much additional space. You'll expend a lot of effort for not much gain.

Does your laptop have an internal SD card reader? I didn't find out this one does until after I used it for a year or longer. If so then you can install the largest SD card the computer can handle to use for additional storage.

Another thought is to use a USB drive. +++ HERE +++ is another thread where the poster is essentially asking the same question.

RealTrack and RealDrum folders use the most storage space so they are what I'd concentrate on moving to external storage.

[/quote] I've got plenty of room on the desk top (about 5 HDs). The problem I have is with the laptop. [/quote]

Opps, my bad.

If possible I would replace your internal drive with a new 2TB SSD.

PS - I don't know about your finances hence the if possible.

Good luck

Yes, I would replace the internal with a bigger SSD. The little extra things in Biab folder won't change the free space much.
If you have a DVD drive in the laptop you can swap it for a SSD HDD caddy to give an extra hard drive.

I’m sure you know this, but whatever you do for your laptop, you need to keep roughly 15% free space for a hard drive. Some experts report it should even be a little higher percentage for an SSD.

BIAB works perfectly fine with the RealTracks and RealDrums on an external USB drive.

John Ford and I discussed the need for some sort of guide about where everything is stored, including what can be moved or deleted. If I get some free time I’ll write one.

Matt.

Ive been on a quest for some time now for a suitable new more flexible beast of a pc to run my recording rig.
hopefully some folks in the market for a new or upgrade of pc will find the following of interest.

I just took more days from my love for writing songs and away from these forums in the quest, and this week talked to even more retailers of pc tech. sigh.

The basic issue for moi is laptops lack internal expandability (unless i plop for a laptop from a custom builder of laptops for recording studios….but outside my budget…)...eg…this laptop allows 4 drives i believe.

https://www.adkproaudio.com/adk-regulus-gx30

otoh desktops have the internal expandability ie can stuff multiple m2nvme and older ssd’s in them..a need of mine…but lose portability.

It shows retailers lack of understanding of needs of recording studios when they say ‘you need 3 ssd’s in a laptop !! huh ?’ until one explains.

A typical reply i get is sorry ‘mate’ we only sell one drive laptops.
Pipelines brilliant dvd replacement idea is one solution for a second drive.
But i want 3.

Otoh ya gotta be careful with new desktops …sigh and ensure one has the right pcie version and number of ‘lanes’ to support the latest m2/nvme ssd tech.
Yes the new tech m2’s will work in older pcie 3,...but it looks like at decreased data rates.
There is another ‘wrinkle’ as it were… in that if one wants to use m2/nvme with more lanes one needs to use a 11th generation or above processor...which has the 'more lanes' support i understand.

HOWEVER , now i’m reading articles saying the new processors consume more power…sigh.

As i like refurbs cos of cost savings i think the only solution for a beast of a recording system is to stuff multiple ssd’s // m2’s via pcie adaptor into a off lease hpz workstation (or dell or lenovo equivalent) for a total cost of 800 buckies. And eat the small performance hit of older pcie 3 rather than pice 4 or above, as well as the portability.

I’m laptop currently , and its been a v good beast of a i5 refurb with even an external sata port, (and ive done 90 songs with it using reaper/biab/realband combo)...but still i need more flexibility than it offers.

To anyone considering a one drive cheap laptop i would suggest caution cos it might not meet ones future needs.
you might rapidly outgrow it.
as one will see if one peruses many pro audio user forums.


peace out.
om

FWIW, I'm planning a short or ultra-short 2U rackmount chassis.

For me it'll go into my existing ready-for-the-road Gator flightcase setup, but the same could go into a 2U flight case. A 1U is feasible, but less flexible and more noisy. Increasing the flightcase to 4U would allow plenty of space inside to package screen, keyboard, mouse into a comfortably portable unit. My screen (touch-screen) is actually bigger than the rack, but stores glass side to a ply board, for protection, on the case top.

This definitely wouldn't suit everyone, but it may give food for thought.

Gordon.

Yep rack mounts are grreat like ive seen in big studios.
These start at 1600 bucks.
I would like one but cant justify the expense for the crazy songs i do…got othr responsibilities like i just had to service our car, then the dryer went on the blink. Just as i get ready to buy something , i got something else…lol.

https://silentpc.com/daw/

https://www.carillonac1.com/daw-computers/music-pc-rack-case/
Second one above prices are in quids.

What ive realised is that a lot of people buying a new vanilla pc for music production might not realise , if they want to expand the desktop tower later how important the ‘lanes support’ at the processor level is…
Eg needing added m2nvme drives and/or other devices later on.

Here is an interesting table of lanes support with some processors.
Just google ‘processor lanes support’ and there is lots of info….and its rather important when considering any new system and the needs of m2nvme ssd etc, and of course pice version implemented in any new system.

This stuff aint trivial if one wants a serious flexible music production pc that will grow with one as ones needs change.
https://www.velocitymicro.com/blog/what-are-pcie-lanes-why-do-they-matter/

Give my regards to england gordon. Sometimes i miss good old ‘blighty’ lol.

Happiness.
om

Om, I can hear Eddy Arnold singing "Welcome to My world" because your "life gets in the way of my music" is exactly like mine! Its a bummer ain't it!

Most of the high-price rackmounts are servers with multiple disc caddies, dual supplies and so on. It's quite feasible to get a reasonably(!) priced rackmount, though I'll agree they're not cheap as such.

There's a pre-built example here in the UK, which isn't bad value and is designed for quiet: https://g2digital.co.uk/products/rack-pc/2u-nano/

I'll probably build my own, though not definitely.

I offer it merely as a thought, rather than "you should do this".

Mario.

Its like my dad used to say, lol…’one puts the ends together…then something comes along to pull them apart again.’. My saying is ‘ya just keep rocking no matter what’. I’m just glad i can still enjoy music.
keep rocking mario. You got a ton of talent mate.


Gordon.

Would be interested to know how many m2/nvme ssd drives and the config your considering.
Ive found its like pulling hens teeth to find out often on the normal retail pc;s..
what pcie version they are running. Whether pcie 3 or 4 or 5 etc.

Its kinda important cos i understand m2/nvme will downgrade speed wise on lower versions of pcie. Apparently they/some ? will still work but not at their optimum spec.
For my new pc i’m going all m2 … 3 m2 will keep me happy. one for win , one for recording//playback and one for sample libs.

Now i understand pcie 6 spec is out. As of early 2022.

https://pcisig.com/pci-express-6.0-specification

WOW THATS SPEEDY.

The thirst for speed….lol. Now heres the 64000 quid question …

Are we reaching the point when raw ssd speed and pcie throughput are more important than the processor spec ?
ie can we get away with say a next generation i3 or i5 more affordable processor but supported say with pcie 5 or 6 ? what are the ramifications for daw use on a daily basis ??

Have we reached the point whereby the budget processors under 200 bucks are sufficient if used with high spec throughput pcie 5/6 and assuming m2/nvme ?

Best
om

I'll likely have two, mostly for capacity rather than speed.

The problem with an awful lot of pre-built PCs is that the sales people really don't know some of these details. There are a couple of reasons for that:

1) Often they don't really know what the question really means.

2) Often, even when they do know what it means, they're unable or unwilling to say because the company reserves the right to change the motherboard for a different one without warning. "Policy of continuous improvement", which could cover performance, costs, or supply issues.

The reason I tend to end up building my own, is that I can make my own choices of tradeoffs, I'm not reliant of the vagaries of the vendors. The other alternative is to ask a builder you trust to specify & build a machine to your requirements. That isn't necessarily more expensive than off-the-shelf, because you probably don't need, for example, a huge, ultra-fast and shockingly expensive gaming graphics card, which most will put into their higher-end machines.

My contribution to the discussion. M2s are generally far faster than SSDs, both are faster than HHD's which are now redundant except for bulk storage. If your laptop has a HHD probably the laptop is old. You can upgrade it,(check to make sure its got a port for SSD plug first) but I would wonder if it's time for a new laptop or even a dedicated music PC. Over the COVID and Chip crisis laptops don't seem to have kept up with desktops IMO.
If I were to buy a laptop for music I would be looking for 1TB m2 and 32 gb of ram minimum. That would be a bear minimum - I don't think most laptops would pass this test. M2 prices have dropped, they generally outclass all SSDs, but you do need a slot for them on the motherboard (or an expansion card), and as with SSDs the "maximum" speed depends on the PCI lanes of the motherboard. I have PCI 3 here on my mobo/PC, but even that is old tech. SSD generally run at about 550 MBps, M2's run at anything from 2000- 7500, with most running at around 3500.

Sounds like your into using music apps. Advice for BIAB is one thing, advice for a general music machine is another. If you intent to make use of a lot of MIDI VST sample work in your sequencer, then more RAM is better.

An idea rather than using a rack case is to use an HTPC ITX case. I did that with my current gaming desktop, and using a Fractal Node 202 case it's about 1mm slimmer than 2 rack units, and I can fit a full-size video card, 2x 2.5in SSD's/HDD's, and the motherboard has two M.2 slots. For a studio rack this can sit on a shelf or on top of another piece of gear. The only trick is making everything fit in an 82mm chassis.

Agree, provided one doesn't want very high performance, though it's surprising just how much performance one can get.

I have two mini-ITX PCs here, one fanless and virtually silent, and one almost fanless. The former is my fileserver with an Atom CPU at 1.9GHz and has a few TB on one conventional hard drive, the an i686 at 1.7GHz with similar storage lives in an outbuilding and is my automated backup PC.

As one raises the performance, though, one raises the fan noise.

Certainly, but you can cram a lot of performance into an ITX machine these days. This one has a 6-core i5-11400 CPU, 32gb of ram (could do 64gb), a GTX 1060 6b video card, and a 2tb NVMe SSD. Fan noise is pretty minimal. This case came with a 450w PSU as well.

Aye ... BTW I forgot to mention that both of those ITX machines of mine are around a decade old now.

Series 11 i5s seem to be a fairly common ITX engine now. There are even some 12th gens. ITX boards tend to use the laptop CPUs for efficiency, which certainly helps wrt fan noise. There are some ITX cases around that have aluminium fins and heat-pipes to allow fanless operation for around the 65W TDP CPUs. That includes a number of 12th gen parts and AMD parts, though most(?) 12th gens appear to need throttling back to stay within the 65W.

ITX can give pretty impressive performance for modest cost, size and energy.

That's something I encountered when I built my current production machine, which has an i9-9900K - the motherboard would basically allow it to exceed it's TDP by more than double, but for a relatively small performance increase. I ended up enabling TDP enforcement (can't remember what the actual option was called) which keeps temperature and fan noise down but still gives much more performance than is required for audio.

I do the same in my ITX gaming machine, and the performance is about as good as my i9. For the most part, computers these days have more performance than most people need.