Need More ROOM in my Ibook G4 to use Garageband and Loops

[kmgreensman]

Hey guys, I dont know what I need for this purpose. Can I buy an external hard drive to do this. I can't put anything else on my G4 because I have no more room, but I want to add plugins and loops. Can I do this by adding an external hard drive or do I need to upgrade my internal Hard drive or memory. Just not sure about all this...

Thanks,

Curt

[sachi]

You can use an external hard drive. You have a firewire 400 port on that, right? That's what I would recommend, although just about every external drive that works with firewire will also have a USB port.

[muscmp]

Originally Posted by sachi

You can use an external hard drive. You have a firewire 400 port on that, right? That's what I would recommend, although just about every external drive that works with firewire will also have a USB port.

+1 this should serve your purpose. note that you may need a firewire cable, if you don't end up using it in usb. if you do, check monoprice as they are great cables and fairly cheap.

[ljguitar]

Originally Posted by kmgreensman

Hey guys, I dont know what I need for this purpose. Can I buy an external hard drive to do this. I can't put anything else on my G4 because I have no more room, but I want to add plugins and loops. Can I do this by adding an external hard drive or do I need to upgrade my internal Hard drive or memory. Just not sure about all this...

Thanks,

Curt

Hi Curt…
If your computer is that full, you also need to purge data or transfer it so you have ''working'' space on the hard drive. You need about ⅓ of the drive's capacity (when empty) so you have headroom to work.

That could be accomplished by using the external drive you get to transfer ''stuff'' to it.

For simple recording, a USB drive will work, but if you are going to be mixing or recording many tracks at once, then a Firewire drive will be faster.

[rdm321]

Keep your program files on the computer HD, and put your data files (in this case your recordings) on the external.

When you work on a song, it is pulled it up into RAM. If the song is large, with a lot of tracks, you can free up RAM by having some tracks play directly from the hard drive (I forget what this step is called; your GarageBand book will tell you).

You might also consider getting two external HDs. Back up everything onto both, because sooner or later one of them will fail.

[sachi]

Originally Posted by ljguitar

Hi Curt…
If your computer is that full, you also need to purge data or transfer it so you have ''working'' space on the hard drive. You need about ⅓ of the drive's capacity (when empty) so you have headroom to work.

Although it's true that you need empty space on a hard drive for the computer to work, you don't need to set aside 1/3 of today's drives. Unless you're doing video work 10 gigabytes empty should be more than enough.

[BBWW]

Adding a new and faster internal hard drive is cheap. You can get a Terabyte Drive these days for $80 bucks. I'm betting that will at least quadruple your onboard storage. Easy to change the disk drive yourself if you are a little handy. I've done this in laptops many times...Macs and a few PC's.

Buy a $10 USB case for your old drive and use that as storage too...