only in serato? like in the comment tag?

I've been told by a number of associates (record producers, sound engineers, computer geeks) that it is generally considered "safer" and "advantageous" to run your music from an external drive, preferably one connected via fire wire.

The arguments put forward to this end, is that your computer will subsequently have less "processing work to do".

In essence, when playing audio files from the internal, your computer has to run "sytems", "search for the audio files" as well as play them.

Using the external HD therefore gives the machine and its cpu more breathing space and less work to do since the music is not being played internally. Being a computer layman meself, I can't swear on the veracity of this theory but it seems fairly sound to me.

(Hope my narrative makes some kinda sense)

Yeah Josh, the BPM tag in serato, I couldnt figure out how to input the BPM in the ID tag's of the actual MP3's, so I just have them entered into SSL, so if I convert all my music into an external drive, am I going to have to enter all the BPM's again?

SSL will have written the BPMs to the BPM id3 tag for you, so they will transfer when you move them to the external drive.

Capo...

You are 100% correct. Running your system, serato and having all your music on the internal drive is asking for trouble. It heavily taxes the system, makes it run hotter and can lead to glitches. Drives are cheap nowadays. Install your serato program and songs to an external. Worse comes to worse and you have a crash or your comp breaks before your event you can just borrow one, plug in your drive and you are good to go. Unless you got the $$$ to have a backup comp that you bring to your event.

So the key point in this thread is nobspangles post: Scratch LIVE uses ID3 tags.

Thanks guys, anyone reccomend a good external??? I saw the other post where they were bashing the Lacie drives, but nobody mentioned a better one, and they reccomend them on turntablelab.com..................

I can recommend two better one right now, Glyph or Rocstor, but they aren't gonna come cheap. As far as the Turntablelab recommendation, I think they are an apple dealer so I am pretty much sure that is the motivation for them to push the Lacie drives.

When is all comes down to all the external drive companies use the same drives inside (Glyph uses Seagate for example). What you are paying extra for in some cases for is a heavy duty external structure (Glyph uses an all Steel case, Rocstor is solid Aluminum), quality and stability of the interface (make sure any external drive you get utilizes the Oxford 911 chipset) and warranty (Glyph offers overnight replacement for the first year and I think 48 hour for the remaining 4 years). You can get a cheap drive but why skimp on the most important part of your show. If the drive goes down you are screwed. If you want to go the cheap route then buy a backup so your butt is covered is something happens.

PS I don't work for Glyph or Rocstor. I have been using them for years for studio work and on the road. Never had a problem.

I can tell you since I have several externals that I have been testing for months.... I do not like the Maxtor OneTouch II. (At least for Serato) It looks nice and is solid but the jury is still out on if its the best drive to use with Serato. My problem is here....

www.scratchlive.net

I have not had problems with the Maxtor OneTouch I or the Lacie drives that I own. My suggestion is to get a drive that has a fan in it. And of course back up often.

Lacie External Firewire 250G is the one I use with my ibook G4.. works great

Here is another question, if my computer is 60GB and I dont even have 5GB of music on my G4, and im ONLY using my G4 for serato and nothing else, it shouldn't cause the computer to work harder than if I had an external would it??? When using an external arent' you using another usb??? So I would be running 2 usb's at the same time, that sounds like more work for the computer to me than if your just using the internal hard drive. I just dont think I need an external yet, I only have about 4GB of music on my computer and I dont plan on putting that much more in yet, and my computer seems to be running fine.

right now i have 60gb+ of music stored in my laptop 100gb HD
i havent had problems

im not a pc expert but doesnt serato uses more of the processor and RAM rather than the HD itself?

to me HD is more of a storage the Chip and ram do all of the work.

its like opening up a word document it is loaded to RAM do your typing then save it it goes back to the HD
the CPU speed is how fast you can do a job

wouldnt it be similar that when you load a song to Serato that song is copied to RAM?
and you do what ever you want; scratch, back spin, etc

someone enlighten me
Im here to learn new stuff

How much work your drive has to do depends on a few things,
1. Are you playing AIFF/WAV or mp3/ogg?
Playing compressed files will use much less drive access than uncompressed, but, neither is much of a test for a modern disk (even a laptop one)
2. The second thing is if you have less than 128MB of RAM on a PC, Windows will be doing a lot of page file access which always means loads of disk thrashing.

Serato only copies a portion of the file to RAM (a buffer) this means that delays in reading from the disk don't affect backspins or scratching.