Hey there folks,

I know there have been many, many, posts on this topic, but I am looking for the best way to accomplish my specific goals post-install, and I'd like to avoid as much freezing and crashing as possible.

So here's the deal. I've been running BiaB on the same HD since 2017, and installed 2018 and 2019 over that. everything is installed there to the external drive (F), except for plugins which is not an issue because I set the paths appropriately.

The connection for my USB port has gotten extremely loose, and unplugs itself at the most random times. I have become so wary of damaging the program irreparably through these crashes, that I've all but stopped using the program entirely over the last few weeks. Note that I love the speed of my laptop's SSD I have very little space on it to spare.

I alos have a much more powerful desktop, but for the moment I'm traveling a lot, and do not live in the same place for the space of a single week, so I use that only when I want to render something down and make my final edits for export.

Lately I've become very interested in exploring the MIDI aspects of the program (and I'm not even referring to the MSTs, I could do without those for the moment). However, I know there are a lot more functions to the program than just the "container" which use files like soloist files, melodist files, etc, and I want to make sure I have them installed, yet at the same time have the ability to pop in my external drive here and there where and have the program know exactly where to look for the RTs. I also want to spend more time with RB's MIDI and piano roll, etc, and work with external audio samples, vsts, and the like.

To cut this short. I currently have both my desktop and laptop "authorized" (in other words, even though I run BiaB from the same external drive, I had to put in an authorization code when I first plugged it in to the desktop), and I want the program to do everything it can without any RTs, on both BUT I want it tio recognize and access RTs from the external drive whenever it's plugged in (I do want the loops installed both on each computer AND the external drive though, if that's possible). I would prefer not to resinstall anew, and have to refresh my authorizations because that would all be a massive PITA.

Can this be done without getting hit with a million access violation messages or whatever as the program automatically looks for stuff on a drive that's not there?

Any advice on how to go about this would be very much appreciated. :-)

Thanks in advance!

Band-in-a-Box 2024. Custom Build Desktop PC W/ Windows 10 Home 64-bit. CPU: Intel Core i5-9600k @ 3.7GHz (6 core x 6 threads) RAM: 16GB DDR4. Storage 238GB SSD + 2.7 TB HDD. GPU: ZOTAC NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti 4GB