PG Music Home
Posted By: w To or not to Erase Un-Needed Real Track files... - 11/26/17 04:26 PM
I have a legacy intel iMac running 10.7 LION with Band in a Box 2017 Audiophile installed on a 1 TB USB drive .

In reviewing the RealTracks preferences this tip came up stating, as follows : your RealTracks folder has extra files that are not needed. You can save lots of hard drive space by deleting these files. You can do this from the RealTracks-Settings dialog, and press button "Erase Un-Needed Files"'

I am not sure about taking that action to erase files.

Is anyone here familiar with these " instructions " ?

Does it zapp those files for ever or does it allow me to review those files and then decide if it will really " save lots of hard drive space " . Also considering the fact that the USB is 1 TB how much space would be saved ?

I would appreciate your thoughts and comments to help me decide what to do.
My understanding is that when RealTracks were first introduced one set of RealTracks would include many more individual files than what are needed today to create the same RealTracks set.

Open Band-in-a-Box and click on the "About" button and you'll see:
Quote:
- This program uses élastique Pro by zplane.development as time stretching and pitch transposition engine. More info: www.zplane.de (Version 3.1.11)


The elastique Pro feature enables Band-in-a-Box to change the pitch or timing of an audio file. As Zplane improves the feature some of the audio files formerly required are no longer needed and are redundant. "Erase un-needed files" gets rid of the redundant files.

If you started using Band-in-a-Box in just the last few years then your computer likely does not have the redundant audio files as PG Music quit including them as they became redundant.
Jim is correct. In earlier versions of BIAB when Realtracks were growing, there was a different system used and this took up much more space. I'm not sure that this is what you're experiencing, though.

If the files are on the USB drive that came from PG Music, the above does not apply and I'd leave them there.

The PG Music USB drive for the Audiophile edition of BIAB also has compressed versions of all the audio files on it. These allow a user to install the equivalent of the EverythingPak or UltraPlusPak on their computer's hard drive if they want to. That's how I run BIAB.

On my internal hard drive, I've used the USB drive setup routine to install the compressed files. I use these most of the time. Then when I start creating a song seriously, I connect the USB drive and work with that until the song is done.

I suspect that what your computer is referring to is these compressed files.

If the above is the case, I wouldn't delete them.

Regards,
Noel


That message will be referring to extra "+/-" files that are left-over from a very old installation (from before we started using Z-Plane Elastique). They're safe to delete.

Band-in-a-Box doesn't delete the compressed RealTrack files, so that's definitely not what the message is referring to.

Thanks
Kent
PG Music
Cool... live and learn. You were right Jim smile
Thanks to all for contributing their knowledge and advice.

Now as i originally noted:

Quote:
In reviewing the RealTracks preferences this tip came up stating, as follows : your RealTracks folder has extra files that are not needed. You can save lots of hard drive space by deleting these files. You can do this from the RealTracks-Settings dialog, and press button "Erase Un-Needed Files"'


And so, having the knowledge and advice all you Bander's provided me my conclusion ( aside from NOT erasing what i have ) is that the RealTracks preference sub-programme needs some fine tuning by the PG tech crew .

However I will not be putting that forth because they are all ready swamped with our requests to do this for us and or do that for us. Also i am awaiting for them to issue a BETA for the Mac Band 2018.
Originally Posted By: Noel96
Cool... live and learn. You were right Jim smile


High praise from the master fixer of all things BiaB! Made my day indeed! grin
More specifically: If you started using BBox before 2011 and you have NEVER done a "clean install" of later versions since, then you might safe some space by using this option. But blindly using this preference on any of the newer versions simply because it's there can indeed cause you problems, so it's safest to leave this function well alone!

And to you Mr. Magoo I will also add that the suggestion to remove this particular preference option altogether from the later versions has already been made and passed on to PG, by yours truly. So that's one less thing for you to worry about wink
© PG Music Forums