EXS 24 Logic Sampler Users Group

Josh Emmons wrote: 

>
> Mike Newman wrote:
> > I'll be using Logic and EXS24 for the first time with the release of
> > Logic 6.  I have a Dual GIG G4 with 1.5 GIG Ram and two 80 GIG hard
> > drives. I have about 50 GIG worth of Sample CD-ROMs and will be using
> > the  Vienna Symphonic Library EXS24 Edition Complete Orchestral
> > Package when it's released next month.
>
> Here's the deal: partitioning a drive is not really going to help you 
> (as far as I know/have been able to tell by playing around) when it 
> comes to playing samples/bounding audio.  In fact, partitioning a drive 
> could exasperate the problem.


If you have only one drive I would definitely partition it and put all audio
files and samples together in an audio partition. On PC  you would format this
partition to the largest cluster size available --64kb in Win2k and XP for
example. This partition can then be defragged in seconds and will perform
better than a single system partition formatted with small cluster sizes and
with the audio and apps and system spread all over it. 

>
> What you want to do is make sure that each part of your workflow that 
> requires harddrive access has it's own drive (and, ideally, it's own 
> bus, though that's not really as important with reasonably low-bandwidth 
> samples).


These are good principles  to follow -- if you have a RAID card you could put
streaming samples on the RAID array, audio files on an audio drive and the
system and Logic on the system drive.

>
> The average EXS24 setup has three parts that require drive access. 
> There's the part that runs the OS and loads the actual Logic and EXS24 
> software.  There's the part that loads samples.  Then there's the part 
> the loads/writes/ the song.


>
> It sounds as though you have two internal 80Gig drives, right?  Here's 
> what you should do.  Install Logic on the same drive that has your 
> operating system on it.  Install all your samples onto the other drive. 
>   Then buy a fast firewire drive, plug it into you computer, and save 
> your  song files there.


Unless by song files you mean the audio files for the song I think you are
mistaken here. The song file (often less than a MB) resides in RAM and only
gets written to disk when you save. It places no demands on drive performance.
The audio files that you are streaming from disk -- including bounced or frozen
tracks as well as recorded audio inputs -- they will benefit from a separate
drive, preferably on a separate channel.

Regards,
Murray