Have you noticed that some Romplers like Groove Agent, Plugsound 1-6 don't allow the sample files to be on another location than the actual plugin dll file? Is there a workaround this problem? I am hoping for a utility that creates shortcuts that point to the samples on my other drives so that the rompler is tricked. Otherwise I'll have to think twice before I spend money on these tempting plugsound libraries!!!

I hope there's an answer to this or else I'll have to repartition my hard drives.

There is a work aorund for M-tron as of the latest build.

Your suppose to be able to have VG and VGEE's samples on a different drive, but seems to just cause me problems...

The developers need to address this. Communicate with them. It is an oversight.

Spectrasonics plug-ins can have the .dat files located on another drive. We have a utility for Windows users called "SpectraMove" that allows you to move it to any drive or location. (Macs can just use an alias.)

spectrum

The Plugsound Instruments work fine with aliases to the *.dat files on Mac, so I guess on Windows you could use 'SpectraMove' for them, too...(?)

I'll go fetch the SpectraMove prog and see what happens. I'll let you know if it can be used from any program (not just Spectrasonic's).

jim

I cannot even download it, since I don't have Spectrasonics' software on my system ! They want you to own their synth, to get the proggie. So, I don't see any chance that it would work with other companies' software.

So it's true, it's up to the developers....

I don't know too much about Windows system (only from time to time work on some PC), but is a shortcut not done as easily as an alias on Mac? Seem to remember, that you right-click, say 'create shortcut' or something and then put it to wherever you want. Is there more to it?

You can put a shortcut for any kind of file, but programs try to retrieve data from the shortcut itself, not its target.

At least that's what I tried to do and never achieved.

It drives me crazy when developers hard-code the location of content in their applications and force you to install the content to specific locations and make it impossible to manage your disks and data the way you want.

You can work around this issue with some programs by looking for registry entries or configuration files that store the content location. But some -- like Plugsound as far as I can tell -- are really hard-coded to look for a specifically named file in the installation folder. Not only does this prevent you from managing data and disk space the way you want, but if you have multiple hosts that require the plugin dll to be in different directories, you are really hosed. You have to copy the entire content as well as the dll. It's a nightmare.

SpectraMove is a utility program that modifies the Windows Registry entries for products from Spectrasonics. It doesn't work for any application except those provided by Spectrasonics.

James

If you're using 2K/XP and NTFS, get hold of junction.exe from the MS res Kit and use that: it allows you to create hard and soft links between files and directories using so-called "reparse points". Not a lot of people know about it, but it's incredibly useful for keeping multiple disks organised.

Wow -- that's a great tip!

Using junction, I just got Chainer to load correctly all of my Plugsound instruments linking from the VSTPlugins folder on my D drive to the actual Plugsounds installation in the Samples folder on my E drive.

Woo-hoo! (Almost as good as a Mac or Unix )

Thanks, ck !!!



James

Hmm, I can't see anywhere this junction thing. Where can I download it from? If nowhere, is there a spare copy for me?????

Thanks ck for bringing this nightmare to an end, and dr.wackler for the link! I haven't tried anything yet, I hope it'll work for me too.

Thanks again

It only seems to work on ntfs partitions though.

I would like to find a way to link files from a fat32 partition to an ntfs one.

I only have ntfs (reliability, encryption, compression etc) on winXP. I just tried this junction.exe file, also copied it in my c:\windows directory.

I couldn't find a way to make a junction between two files, but it was straightforward with directories. So, my grand theft auto installation migrated to my big documents drive while my system still thinks that it's in the c:\program files directory.

I will use the same strategy when plugsound arrives !!!

jim

I have VG and VG EE and have no problem with having the samples on another hard drive (I have a PC with Windows XP). With VG EE, I had to install a fix from their web site.

With the Spectrasonics stuff, I read a post by one of the developers that there was a download to take care fo this problem, but I am not aware fo the particulars.

JeffN

Glad it's useful - it's made my life easier in a lot of cases (I've also used it for some weird mappings on a network file server to allow all its drives to be accessed from one remote drive letter - quite useful).

It does only work on NTFS partitions though, because only the NTFS supports reparse points in metadata - it doesn't and never will support FAT(32). I thought it did support file symlinking but it doesn't appear to - I'm sure I read that you could do it somehow. Back to Win2K Internals tonight!