pikingrin
what is this?
Due to an upcoming move, this Friday to be exact, I'm being forced to downsize my recording setup. It's not permanent but it could be for upwards of a year, possibly more - hopefully not more than 10 months but it depends on how long it is before the builder can start, which also depends on how crappy of a winter we'll have in NE Indiana this year.
But I digress...
At the moment, I'm making sure that all of my software is up to date and I'm almost done with that. My plan is to put all my plugins and VSTi libraries onto a large 2tb external hard drive so that I can use a laptop. Instead of doing a fresh Cubase install on one of my laptops (1 mac and 1 PC - good mac, crappy cheap PC) I am going to just download Reaper onto the machine I choose to make use of and use that in the interim. I would like to use the mac simply because it's loaded better than the PC. The PC is a cheap wally world special with a Pentium processor and Win 10 on it, pretty sure it's got 4gb of RAM but it's a clunker of a machine. If I didn't have to have it for a few classes I would have never bought it... The mac is a 2013 model MacBook pro with a 2.4ghz i5 processor, 8gb of RAM and a 120gb SSD. It's got 2 thunderbolt connections which may give me more options for interfaces, too, as my current interface is a firewire (and I won't have room to use it anyway).
First question, which seems stupid but I'm a finance guy not an IT expert (so please take it easy on me), is will an external HDD with plugins that were downloaded (or installed) specifically for a windows PC be plug-and-play compatible with a mac? If not, then I will regretfully have to use the junker.
Second, equally important, question is this: is having all of my plugins and VST instrument libraries on an external drive going to completely screw me when it comes to making use of them? Am I asking for crazy latency issues? Second part of this question is, if I do put all VST/VSTis on one external drive and use another external for my recording drive (recording drive connected through thunderbolt if I can use the mac), is that going to exponentially increase that issue?
There may be other issues that I'm not considering by going this route; if there are, or if there are any questions, I'm game to hear them and answer them respectively... Thanks in advance.
But I digress...
At the moment, I'm making sure that all of my software is up to date and I'm almost done with that. My plan is to put all my plugins and VSTi libraries onto a large 2tb external hard drive so that I can use a laptop. Instead of doing a fresh Cubase install on one of my laptops (1 mac and 1 PC - good mac, crappy cheap PC) I am going to just download Reaper onto the machine I choose to make use of and use that in the interim. I would like to use the mac simply because it's loaded better than the PC. The PC is a cheap wally world special with a Pentium processor and Win 10 on it, pretty sure it's got 4gb of RAM but it's a clunker of a machine. If I didn't have to have it for a few classes I would have never bought it... The mac is a 2013 model MacBook pro with a 2.4ghz i5 processor, 8gb of RAM and a 120gb SSD. It's got 2 thunderbolt connections which may give me more options for interfaces, too, as my current interface is a firewire (and I won't have room to use it anyway).
First question, which seems stupid but I'm a finance guy not an IT expert (so please take it easy on me), is will an external HDD with plugins that were downloaded (or installed) specifically for a windows PC be plug-and-play compatible with a mac? If not, then I will regretfully have to use the junker.
Second, equally important, question is this: is having all of my plugins and VST instrument libraries on an external drive going to completely screw me when it comes to making use of them? Am I asking for crazy latency issues? Second part of this question is, if I do put all VST/VSTis on one external drive and use another external for my recording drive (recording drive connected through thunderbolt if I can use the mac), is that going to exponentially increase that issue?
There may be other issues that I'm not considering by going this route; if there are, or if there are any questions, I'm game to hear them and answer them respectively... Thanks in advance.
