Question: Right now the default location for saving user presets, templates, states, and chordsets is on your computer’s internal hard drive. Can these be safely moved to an external HD or SSD?
Some specifics: Right now the default save for chordsets is users / [my name] / library / Scaler Music / scaler 3 / chordsets/ default. The default save for templates and state-saves is
Users / my name / library / Scaler Music / scaler 3 / presets / user
The latter in particular can be enormous files, especially if you’re using third-party plugins - I’ve got some saved states that are 100mb+. I’d love to put them on my 4tb external SSD. Can I just do that, or are there tricks I need to navigate?
In macOS, you can use Soft Links: Copy or Move the specific directory to an external drive, (then delete the source directory if it still exists), then make a soft link (sudo ln -s [path-to-Destination-directory] [original name of removed directory]). macOS will recognize the link and you’ll now be able to save to and read from the moved directory on the external drive.
As I described some time ago on KVR Audio Forum, the presets or saved states can be extremely wasteful of space due to use of blank spaces. For example, SampleTank4 LoFi Piano loaded as instrument, then saved immediately results in 400 MB size preset or saved state. This saved state had 100,000 lines of structured “code” using spaces to indent followed later by 6,000,000 lines of data using spaces to indent, resulting in 6,301,519 lines containing mostly empty space. This was reduced down to 5 MB with 7Z compression, giving an indication of just how incredibly wasteful the saving of presets or states can be versus optimal size (about 99% wasted space). This has not been improved for version 3.2 build 1029558.
What is the recommended workaround for not having valuable space chewed up?
Also, surely this is worthy of a hotfix right @davide ?
This will likely be an even bigger issue for users of the imminent IPad version as most users have even less storage space on tablets than they do on their desktop/laptop.