# Sample management



## akhill jain (Nov 27, 2021)

Hello,
I was watching a video by Anne-Kathrin Dern on hardware required for music production, which was really insightful and there were a few points about sample management.
Since I'm a macbook user and not so aware of the technicals, I thought of seeking some clarity on the same. Some help would be really appreciated 😅

1) she uses a dedicated machine with multiple hard drives which acts as a server just for sample streaming. This is the first time I've heard about this. Could someone please explain how does the referencing work from an entirely different system?

2) There was a mention about accessing various libraries through different hard drives as opposed to loading all through one, which does reduce the load on one single drive. Do you folks practice this too? What does your setup look like? How many drives are ideal in this kinda setup?

3) How do you all divide usage between SSD and HDD. A single external SSD's storage capacity is relatively lesser and I'm guessing to store many sample libraries at once might not be feasible? (Please correct me if I'm wrong here). What is your workflow like? with reference to this.

4) I've heard from a few that maintaining 2 or atleast 1 backup drive for samples is ideal. I have wondered for a while now that to avoid relocating samples when accessed via the backup drive, should the backup drive be named exactly the same?
For example if the libraries in the main drive are stored in :
My passport- Vst- Cinesamples
Should the backup drive have the same content path?

Thank you so much! Really looking forward to getting some responses and hearing about personal setups and workflows.


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## Pier (Nov 27, 2021)

akhill jain said:


> 1) she uses a dedicated machine with multiple hard drives which acts as a server just for sample streaming. This is the first time I've heard about this. Could someone please explain how does the referencing work from an entirely different system?


Are you referring to VEP? This is a software that runs the virtual instruments in another machine, and streams the audio to your composing machine. I've never used it myself, but AFAIK it doesn't require anything special other than the two machines being in the same wired network.

In all operating systems, it's possible to mount a remote drive as a network drive. In theory you can host the samples in a different machine and load them via a very fast network (eg: 10Gbps or 100Gbps ethernet). Although, it's probably much simpler and cheaper to just add SSDs to your current machine.


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## akhill jain (Nov 28, 2021)

Pier said:


> Are you referring to VEP? This is a software that runs the virtual instruments in another machine, and streams the audio to your composing machine. I've never used it myself, but AFAIK it doesn't require anything special other than the two machines being in the same wired network.
> 
> In all operating systems, it's possible to mount a remote drive as a network drive. In theory you can host the samples in a different machine and load them via a very fast network (eg: 10Gbps or 100Gbps ethernet). Although, it's probably much simpler and cheaper to just add SSDs to your current machine.



Hey! Thanks for the response!
She did mention about VEP in an entirely different video, but the one I'm referring to is purely on hardware.
In any case, Thanks for your response it's really helpful and insightful!! Cheers😁


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## akhill jain (Nov 28, 2021)

Pier said:


> Are you referring to VEP? This is a software that runs the virtual instruments in another machine, and streams the audio to your composing machine. I've never used it myself, but AFAIK it doesn't require anything special other than the two machines being in the same wired network.


Sorry, I just realised what you said about VEP was right! She uses it on the sample streaming pc! Thank you and sorry for the confusion


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## Pier (Nov 28, 2021)

akhill jain said:


> Sorry, I just realised what you said about VEP was right! She uses it on the sample streaming pc! Thank you and sorry for the confusion


No worries!

Glad you figured it out!


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## A.Dern (Dec 3, 2021)

akhill jain said:


> 1) she uses a dedicated machine with multiple hard drives which acts as a server just for sample streaming. This is the first time I've heard about this. Could someone please explain how does the referencing work from an entirely different system?
> 
> 2) There was a mention about accessing various libraries through different hard drives as opposed to loading all through one, which does reduce the load on one single drive. Do you folks practice this too? What does your setup look like? How many drives are ideal in this kinda setup?
> 
> ...



Hi there!

Let me see if I can detangle this a bit. 

I can see you've already figured out that the second machine is running Vienna Ensemble Pro to do the sample streaming. This is a common setup BUT not necessary these days anymore. You can also run VEP from the same machine or not use it at all (though it's super handy for film work I find). Up until a few years ago, computers didn't have enough HDD, RAM and CPU capacity to run everything from one machine but these days you can get a pretty decked out Mac or PC that can do everything in one. If I were to start from scratch right now, I'd probably just build a massive PC but in my 9 years of doing this professionally, I've simply accumulated a lot of stuff that is still working so I keep using it.

If you use traditional spinning drives at 7200rpm, you would want to split your sample library across multiple drives to avoid dropouts and to prolong the life of your HDDs. How many you need depends on how many sample libraries you're using and how heavy those are. Back before SSDs were a thing, I used to have 4 HDDs and load one section from each. At the same time they also functioned as clones in case one of them went down. HOWEVER, in the age of SSDs this has become less important since SSDs function completely differently and have a much higher lifespan in general. When SSDs were still stupidly expensive, I'd put the heavy libraries with legatos onto them, but keep the one-off libraries (percussive stuff, keys, etc.) on regular HDDs. But the price of SSDs has gone down enough where not even that is still necessary.

When using SSDs for sample streaming, the read speed is more important than the write speed. There are different kinds of SSDs I use for the OS, for active projects, and for sample streaming. There are NVMe SSDs that I use for my OS for example but I use the (much slower) SATA SSDs for sample streaming (with high read speed but low write speed) and the slightly better Pro SATA SSDs for projects (high read and write speed). I don't use SSDs at all for backups because I don't need the performance there and it gets re-written constantly which isn't necessarily ideal for the lifespan of an SSD. It's debatable whether it's better to get many small NVMe SSDs or a few large SATA SSDs. It can be more cost effective (and performance effective) to get many small ones but if slots in your machine are limited, then go for the larger ones I'd say. In any case, it's less important with SSDs how you divide the sample load. But I'm still learning about the kinds of SSDs and what they're good for and what to expect in terms of lifespan / usage so maybe ask a specialist about these things.

As for the backup drive - yes, it's handy if it's named the same way and has the same file paths. However, Kontakt has become pretty smart over the years so usually when it can't find sample and you point it to the general folder, it'll automatically look for the other samples there too (unlike in the olden days where you had to relink them manually). So re-linking shouldn't take too long and when you save the session (or VEP frame), the new paths are saved too.

Hope this helps!


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## akhill jain (Dec 3, 2021)

@A.Dern Thank you so much for covering all of my queries with such a detailed response Anne. This is really helpful and I feel much more informed now! Really appreciate it. Thanks again! Cheers😁
Also, thank you for the really lovely and insightful content that you put out! Please keep at it🌟❤️


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