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Band-in-a-Box for Windows
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Will an external ssd drive help speed up clunky Bbox performance? If so where should I store program and song files.

Thanks in advance for any ideas.

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It's really hard for anyone to say if it would help without more info.
Have you tried running from the included external drive?
Have you tried running the BiaB program from C:\ drive (just the program, leaving RTs and RDs on the external drive?

How 'clunky' is the performance?
Cutting out? Just taking a long time to generate?

What version of BiaB?


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If your computer only has one internal drive and that drive is almost full then moving the program and all the BiaB content to an external drive and deleting all the PG Music program and content from the internal drive will speed up BiaB.

There are users that run Band-in-a-Box (BiaB) on an external drive. If you do my first suggestion is to have the program and content all on the same drive. However before you do perhaps you want to explore why your current BiaB installation is clunky because my guess is the program will run clunky from the external hard drive.

If you have a Windows computer try using the Disk Cleanup routine to get back more drive storage space.

What programs and apps are running as background tasks?

My laptop is old enough that it began with the Microsoft Vista operating system. It now uses Windows 10 but the Band-in-a-Box program runtime is still smooth.


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I think that we need a lot more information in order to give suggestions.
Things like how much ram do you have? What is the speed of your internal hard drive? What operating system do you have? What is your CPU speed? What do you have running in the background? Info like that will help a lot.

[edit] - I forgot to add how full is your hard drive?

Last edited by MarioD; 11/19/24 05:48 PM.

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64 bit Win 10 Pro, the latest BiaB/RB, Roland Octa-Capture audio interface, a ton of software/hardware
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Thanks for the quick response. I have used Bbox for many years and was thinking the program itself needs a newer set of hardware as it grows in size and complexity. Will try suggestions and post details. I also thought that speedier drive alone might help.

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Originally Posted by dpresley
... I also thought that speedier drive alone might help.
Maybe it will, that depends on your USB speed, which is why I asked if you had tried the external HDD that BiaB comes on.
If that appears a little better, maybe an SSD would make even more difference.
It all depends on where, exactly, your bottleneck is that's causing the performance issue.

I hesitate to suggest a solution until the problem is defined.

Last edited by rharv; 11/19/24 06:16 PM. Reason: Added an 'r' ...

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dpresley,
"Will an external ssd drive help speed up clunky Bbox performance?"
It's a strange question, but lets try to decipher. Do you have a spinner hard drive as your main drive?

What year is your BIAB version?
The reason I ask is that, since 2024 (current) track generation was sped up several folds.

USB ports 3.2? 3.1? or something slower?

Bottom line, If you have one of the ports above and 2024 Ultra Pack which is shipped on a fast ssd drive, regardless of how old your computer is, you should see significant difference in track generation / re-generation speeds, even if you run RTs/Rds from external hard drive.

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Yes, upgrading to BIAB 2024 could help a lot. We need more info to give meaningful help.

Absent that, my first reaction is that CPU power is far more important to performance in BIAB than is the drive you run it on


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The disk cleanup seems to have greatly improved performance. I am running 2024 version an Intel 5 and 12 gig of ram. The 1 tb is now about 2/3 full.

Thanks for the helpful responses!

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Could you define ‘clunky’? One possible cause of audio hiccups is programs running in the background. For a quick test, download and run the free DPC Latency Checker. Let it run several minutes and look for red bars.

Note: it isn’t updated for Windows 10 or 11 but it works fine; just consider 1000 as zero.


BIAB 2025 Win Audiophile. Software: Studio One 7 Pro, Swam horns, Acoustica-7, Notion 6, Song Master Pro, Win 11 Home. Hardware: Intel i9, 32 Gb; Presonus 192 & Faderport 8, Royer 121, Slate VSX, Adam Sub8 & Neumann 120 monitors.
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