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January 14, 2021

How to Save Your Software Instruments to An External HD

 

Last week we dug deep into why you might consider using an external hard drive for saving your Logic Projects. But there was one big piece of the puzzle we didn’t cover.

How do you move and save all your sounds and instruments to that external hard drive?

This is a huge reason why many Logic users choose to buy an external HD.

Software instruments and sounds can take up tons of space. By moving your Sound Libraries off of your Mac’s hard drive, you can free up space and optimize your studio’s workflow.

Logic Pro comes with a huge library of content. Nearly 60 GB in fact!

IMHO, you should definitely download and check out all those sounds. They’re great! But perhaps your hard drive doesn’t have nearly 60 GB of space to spend.

So today let’s walk through how to move Logic’s Sound Library content to an external hard drive.

Not only that, but I’ll show you how to move some specific 3rd party libraries as well, such as:

  • Arturia’s V Collection
  • Native Instruments Komplete

While I can’t cover every instrument library out there, I can help you get started. And after today’s video, I reckon you’ll feel way more comfortable moving forward with the process.

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Filed Under: Apple Loops, File Management, MIDI, Producing, Software Instruments, Workflow

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Don L. says

    January 14, 2021 at 3:56 pm

    You are awesome Chris and spot on with all of your content. Much appreciated.

    Reply
  2. Jesse Holguin says

    January 14, 2021 at 10:50 pm

    YES!! Thanks for the tips here man.

    Especially the Time Machine heads up. Nice looking out.👌

    Reply
  3. Darryll du Toit says

    January 15, 2021 at 10:57 am

    Brillaint Chris, I have recently been thinking about this.
    Thank you so much.

    Reply
  4. Chum says

    January 29, 2021 at 4:10 pm

    Will Logic Automatically locate the sounds when you go to use something like synth?

    Reply
    • Chris says

      January 29, 2021 at 4:37 pm

      Hi Chum, thanks for your comment. Yes, once you move your Sound Library to your external hard drive, that’s where Logic will look for each sound moving forward.

      Reply
  5. Michael says

    February 16, 2021 at 12:09 pm

    Hi Chris, I have LPX 10.4, but I have NO “Relocate sound library…” option. Is there somewhere I need to turn this on?

    Reply
    • Michael says

      February 16, 2021 at 12:20 pm

      Actually, I see that I need to update to at least 10.4.2:

      https://www.musicradar.com/news/rejoice-logic-pro-x-1042-lets-you-move-your-sound-library-to-an-external-hard-drive

      Reply
  6. Peter Selby says

    October 17, 2021 at 2:23 pm

    Thanks for some very helpful information. Question-Can you move the sound library to a specific external hard drive partition that may also contain another partition running Time Machine ?

    Reply
  7. Brent Emerson says

    October 15, 2022 at 3:53 pm

    This sounds so simple but, for me at least, it doesn’t work. Following all the directions here, when I open a new session of Logic many of the sound files show as needing to be downloaded. And when I do they go to the internal drive even though the external drive is shown as the location of the library. Given the number of times this issue is being raised on the Apple Logic boards, I’m not the only one with this problem.

    Reply

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