Can I move my Reason Factory Soundbank to an external hard drive?

[anothercolour]

I am using Reason 6.5.3, and the aliases work for me. I keep the Factory Sound Bank and Orkester on an external hard drive and have aliases in the Reason application folder point to them; I have been doing this for years.

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by anothercolour

I am using Reason 6.5.3, and the aliases work for me. I keep the Factory Sound Bank and Orkester on an external hard drive and have aliases in the Reason application folder point to them; I have been doing this for years.

Try it on Reason 7 and let is know if it works for you. It does not for two folks here who have tried it.

[musicman691]

Originally Posted by Darryl Ramm

Yep I just tried multiple permutations and aliases or symbolic links do not work. Reason calls getattrlist() on the Soundbank file, going out of their way to break if its not a real file. Somewhat annoying they do that.

Darryl

Agreed. At least it's not just me. I cruised the Propheads forum and found a pre-R7 thread where some people had success moving it and some didn't. Systems used was not mentioned.

Originally Posted by anothercolour

I am using Reason 6.5.3, and the aliases work for me. I keep the Factory Sound Bank and Orkester on an external hard drive and have aliases in the Reason application folder point to them; I have been doing this for years.

Originally Posted by Darryl Ramm

Try it on Reason 7 and let is know if it works for you. It does not for two folks here who have tried it.

I think part of what is causing different things for different people (some can do it some not) is not only different versions and also the way Reason is authorized. I think with R7 you can have 3 different ways to authorize: to the computer, cloud or ignition key (Steinberg's dongle which is also used by Vienna). R7 changed a number of things.

[paulreed]

I am on a pc but I have a drive for samples in my machine and have a Reason folder on it, I just copied the soundbanks and orkester onto my sample drive and left the original where it was. I am able to use the soundbanks and orkester from the sample drive and the software finds the original copies where it looks for them to load

[musicman691]

Originally Posted by paulreed

I am on a pc but I have a drive for samples in my machine and have a Reason folder on it, I just copied the soundbanks and orkester onto my sample drive and left the original where it was. I am able to use the soundbanks and orkester from the sample drive and the software finds the original copies where it looks for them to load

How do you know Reason is looking for the factory and Orkester soundbanks where you copied them to? Doing what you did doesn't really help anything as the two soundbanks are still taking up space on the drive you installed them on originally. Try removing the originals and working just off the moved soundbanks and then report back what happens. Reason may still be seeing the originals and referring to them in some way. What version of Reason are you running?

[mesaone]

Originally Posted by Darryl Ramm

Yep I just tried multiple permutations and aliases or symbolic links do not work.l

Hard links work for single files, if symlinks aren't working. At least on windows.

Example: This will (hopefully) fool reason into thinking Orkester is on the C drive, when it really lives on the D drive in a "Reason Sounds" folder.

mklink /H "C:\Program Files (x86)\Propellerhead\Reason\Orkester.rfl" "D:\Reason Sounds\Orkester.rfl"

[Darryl Ramm]

A hard link works on OS X as well, but that is kind of obvious, as there is absolutely no difference between a two hard linked file directory entries, a hard link in that original folder is *exactky* the same as the file being in the folder, and there is a significant difference between say links and aliases and their target file. Which this software is checking for, why the developers would want to do that is beyond me. Hard links are kind of useless here as they cannot span partitions and therefore cannot be used to move a sample library off a partition to either save space or reduce IOPs on that partition/drive.

[mesaone]

Originally Posted by Darryl Ramm

Hard links are kind of useless here as they cannot span partitions

My mistake. I thought they could.

At least the factory soundbanks are only a couple gigabytes, so it's not as much of a hassle as, say, a 40GB kontakt library. If the issue is about putting undue stress on the main drive, I believe it's possible to copy the factory soundbanks to another drive (but keep a copy in the Reason directory, since Reason won't launch without them there). Reason will launch just fine, and you can browse to the second drive when you need to load factory content. That way, it's not actually using the same drive for both the app and the content.

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by mesaone

My mistake. I thought they could.

No unfortunately, a hard link is just a directory entry on a partition that eventually points to the list of data blocks that make up the file, when you create another hard link it creates a copy of that entry and puts it in another directory. They cannot span partitions as it is all fundamentally low level stuff inside the structure of that one partition. When you delete a hard linked file the OS just removes that directory entry and decrements a reference counter. When all links are removed/reference counter is zero then the OS will actually move the data blocks on disk to the free list. BSD Unix popularized symlinks in their fast file system which was a really impressive piece of work at the time and everybody has copied that since. They are special filesystem directory entries that filesystem and OS know are not really files but the OS follows them and opens the file (or directory) pointed to. A programmer if they want to can look at the properties of a directory entry and tell if it is a symlink (or alias) or the actual file, you cannot tell one hard link from any other hard link to the same file as at the lowest level every hard link to a file *is* the file.

[DonaldM]

I've been using Reaper for quite while now and don't see why having the factory banks on the main drive are even an issue. I've got several refills as well and none of it has ever posed a problem for me sitting on the main drive. I'm not understanding why having the factory and Okester banks on the main drive is even an issue.