Moving Rack Extensions to External SSD?

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dremstat
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22 Feb 2022

New to ReasonTalk Forum. I use Reason 12.2.4 on a MacPro [2013]. Just realizing that my Rack Extensions folder is over 25GB. I want to move it to an External SanDisk 4TB Extreme PRO SSD. I've tried creating an alias for the folder, but Authorizer doesn't recognize folder after moving.

Is there an easy way to accomplish this? If there is already an answer here, please point me in the right direction. Otherwise, I'd appreciate any advice.

Thanks!

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jam-s
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22 Feb 2022

On windows you could use a symlink, but on a Mac your only option to free space on the system drive is to remove the biggest REs and not let them sync again.

rootwheel
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23 Feb 2022

dremstat wrote:
22 Feb 2022
New to ReasonTalk Forum. I use Reason 12.2.4 on a MacPro [2013]. Just realizing that my Rack Extensions folder is over 25GB. I want to move it to an External SanDisk 4TB Extreme PRO SSD. I've tried creating an alias for the folder, but Authorizer doesn't recognize folder after moving.

Is there an easy way to accomplish this? If there is already an answer here, please point me in the right direction. Otherwise, I'd appreciate any advice.

Thanks!
Did you make the alias through Finder?

if so, there's a better way of doing it from the Terminal that redirects the folder at a lower level and may fool Reason sufficiently that it will be happy to load them from a different location.

Something like this might do the trick:

Code: Select all

ln -s ~/Library/Application\ Support/Propellerhead\ Software/RackExtensions /Volumes/External\ SSD/RackExtensions
This is where your external drive is called External SSD and you've simply copied the RackExtensions directly into its root.

Let us know how you get on. Good luck!

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jam-s
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23 Feb 2022

From what I've read here Reason does not work using this method (symlink) either. It only works using hard links, but those are limited to the same filesystem.

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crimsonwarlock
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23 Feb 2022

I am uncertain if this is of any help, but on Windows you first have to give the external SSD as fixed mount point, before setting links to it.
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huggermugger
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23 Feb 2022

I had no luck on OSX with moving the REs, either using Alias or using a symlink. I was, however, able to relocate the Optional Devices Content using a simple Alias. This freed up almost 4GB.
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dremstat
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23 Feb 2022

Hey, thanks to everyone for the suggestions! Unfortunately, the symlink didn't work either. Thinking of asking Reason Support for any other suggestions, suspect they'll tell me it's not possible. Also considering dumping a few Rack Extensions that I barely use anymore. Moving the Optional Devices is a good idea, I tried that a while back and it does work. Again, thanks so much.

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integerpoet
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23 Feb 2022

Support for symlinks here doesn't seem like too big a feature request and might even help RS internally.

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huggermugger
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23 Feb 2022

Reason Electric Bass is something like 4GB. I trashed it right away. I've got MODO Bass and Ample Sound Upright Bass, so I'm covered.

Also, I keep a shortcut handy to the Rack Extensions folder, and regularly check it for REs I'm not using and also for Trials, which sometimes linger after they've expired.

flexluthor
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23 Feb 2022

Every other company lets you store your vsts and libraries off your main disk...... but not reason. Just another reason reason is just falling behind everyone

avasopht
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23 Feb 2022

flexluthor wrote:
23 Feb 2022
Every other company lets you store your vsts and libraries off your main disk...... but not reason. Just another reason reason is just falling behind everyone
A very lame decision tbh.

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challism
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23 Feb 2022

flexluthor wrote:
23 Feb 2022
Every other company lets you store your vsts and libraries off your main disk...... but not reason. Just another reason reason is just falling behind everyone
Agreed. And I would guess this problem could be very easily remedied, if they really wanted to give us a solution.
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crimsonwarlock
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24 Feb 2022

avasopht wrote:
23 Feb 2022
flexluthor wrote:
23 Feb 2022
Every other company lets you store your vsts and libraries off your main disk...... but not reason. Just another reason reason is just falling behind everyone
A very lame decision tbh.
It's not a decision at all. When they started developing Reason (and into the first few major updates), external hard disks were not a common thing yet. Making those directories a setting in an installer was not logical at that time.
challism wrote:
23 Feb 2022
Agreed. And I would guess this problem could be very easily remedied, if they really wanted to give us a solution.
I don't think it is easy. Adding a path selector in the installer is easy, and putting that setting in a config-file is also easy. However, they obviously hard-coded those disk locations in the software, and they are probably used in hundreds (or more) of code locations. Changing that would be a serious rewrite of large parts of the code base.
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challism
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24 Feb 2022

crimsonwarlock wrote:
24 Feb 2022
avasopht wrote:
23 Feb 2022


A very lame decision tbh.
It's not a decision at all. When they started developing Reason (and into the first few major updates), external hard disks were not a common thing yet. Making those directories a setting in an installer was not logical at that time.
challism wrote:
23 Feb 2022
Agreed. And I would guess this problem could be very easily remedied, if they really wanted to give us a solution.
I don't think it is easy. Adding a path selector in the installer is easy, and putting that setting in a config-file is also easy. However, they obviously hard-coded those disk locations in the software, and they are probably used in hundreds (or more) of code locations. Changing that would be a serious rewrite of large parts of the code base.
OK, makes sense. What do I know? ha ha ha, I'm not a coder... which is why I was only guessing. I would still love to see the option of moving libraries to other drives. I'd also love to see the the factory sound banks made optional (for Reason and REs alike). Some REs I don't have installed because their libraries are too large (Scenic, for example). It would be great if the libraries were somehow made optional.
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crimsonwarlock
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25 Feb 2022

challism wrote:
24 Feb 2022
OK, makes sense. What do I know? ha ha ha, I'm not a coder... which is why I was only guessing.
I am. But even most coders, who have never worked in legacy software projects, don't understand this dynamic.
challism wrote:
24 Feb 2022
I would still love to see the option of moving libraries to other drives. I'd also love to see the the factory sound banks made optional (for Reason and REs alike). Some REs I don't have installed because their libraries are too large (Scenic, for example). It would be great if the libraries were somehow made optional.
Highly agree. I use the link-hack on Windows, but it is still a hack and not really maintainable. Somewhere in the (hopefully near) future they will have to solve this, as the focus in computing is moving to mobile/removable storage anyway.
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avasopht
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25 Feb 2022

crimsonwarlock wrote:
25 Feb 2022
challism wrote:
24 Feb 2022
OK, makes sense. What do I know? ha ha ha, I'm not a coder... which is why I was only guessing.
I am. But even most coders, who have never worked in legacy software projects, don't understand this dynamic.
Rack Extensions came out in 2012 while Reason came out in 2000. The use of external hard drives was already pretty common by the time I started using Reason in 2002, so that's 10 years.

I highly doubt they are so incompetent that in 2012 they have fixed resource locations scattered around a cross-platform product that has happily been able to change its RE installation directory and does it on multiple operating systems (including running REs in the browser). Even if it was legacy.

It is possible that Codemeter is limited to installing the plugins on the same hard drive as the Reason installation.

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ScuzzyEye
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25 Feb 2022

avasopht wrote:
25 Feb 2022
Rack Extensions came out in 2012 while Reason came out in 2000. The use of external hard drives was already pretty common by the time I started using Reason in 2002, so that's 10 years.
It's not even external drives. PCs have supported multiple hard drives since before Windows even existed. In 1991 I had a 486 with a SCSI interface card and a C: and D: drive, before I even had a CD-ROM drive.

Record (and by extension Reason 5), before REs existed, allowed the scratch space for cached audio to be moved to a different locaion. So Reason Studios (née Propellerhead Software) knew that keeping data, that may end up using a lot of space, in the user's home directory wasn't the best idea, and an option should be provided to move it.

So why wasn't it in the RE installer from the start? Who thought that keeping .dll files in the user's home directory was a good idea? At the time the Ignition Key (ie Codemeter dongle) was all the rage. This isn't a per-user thing, this was a system authentication thing. Maybe it was an attempt to link the Propellerhead user account to a single system account. Regardless this wasn't very forward thinking.

Both Reason and Authenticator are installed/updated together. There's really no reason a non-backward compatible option to select a download/install location for RE couldn't have been added at some upgrade point along the way.

The fact that Authenticator/Reason doesn't know how to follow symlinks on macOS is also baffling. I mean it's been a POSIX standard (the reason Windows has them now) for decades, going on half a century.

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crimsonwarlock
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25 Feb 2022

avasopht wrote:
25 Feb 2022
The use of external hard drives was already pretty common by the time I started using Reason in 2002
I didn't say there were no external hard drives. Those were pretty much the same drives as internal, but in a separate casing. But the use case we now have, with laptops having pretty small SSD drives (like 250 – 500 GB), but external drives with 5 TB becoming pretty affordable, didn't exist at that time. Not even ten years ago. But THAT is the use case where moving large installations to an external drive has merit. All tmo of course :puf_bigsmile:
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Heater
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25 Feb 2022

crimsonwarlock wrote:
24 Feb 2022
I don't think it is easy. Adding a path selector in the installer is easy, and putting that setting in a config-file is also easy. However, they obviously hard-coded those disk locations in the software, and they are probably used in hundreds (or more) of code locations. Changing that would be a serious rewrite of large parts of the code base.
Not a serious re-write. More of an edit. Where the hard coded paths are stored add and extra line with a variable that points to the external drive location that gets defined in a .ini file. It really shouldn't take a decent coder familiar with the code base long.

avasopht
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25 Feb 2022

crimsonwarlock wrote:
25 Feb 2022
avasopht wrote:
25 Feb 2022
The use of external hard drives was already pretty common by the time I started using Reason in 2002
I didn't say there were no external hard drives. Those were pretty much the same drives as internal, but in a separate casing. But the use case we now have, with laptops having pretty small SSD drives (like 250 – 500 GB), but external drives with 5 TB becoming pretty affordable, didn't exist at that time. Not even ten years ago. But THAT is the use case where moving large installations to an external drive has merit. All tmo of course :puf_bigsmile:
Regardless of any history behind the presumed utility of being able to choose an installation directory, it's still just a decision to not offer the option. There's little to no chance it's due to it being a sizeable undertaking - as is the case for many feature omissions.

flexluthor
Posts: 58
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25 Feb 2022

crimsonwarlock wrote:
24 Feb 2022
avasopht wrote:
23 Feb 2022


A very lame decision tbh.
It's not a decision at all. When they started developing Reason (and into the first few major updates), external hard disks were not a common thing yet. Making those directories a setting in an installer was not logical at that time.
challism wrote:
23 Feb 2022
Agreed. And I would guess this problem could be very easily remedied, if they really wanted to give us a solution.
I don't think it is easy. Adding a path selector in the installer is easy, and putting that setting in a config-file is also easy. However, they obviously hard-coded those disk locations in the software, and they are probably used in hundreds (or more) of code locations. Changing that would be a serious rewrite of large parts of the code base.

Dumb take. People have always used multiple drives on Windows. Back in the 90s I had 3 or 4 internal drives. External drives were popular long before Rack Extensions ever became a thing. They are just lazy and not forward thinking. NI lets you store all your libraries in a user defined location and most of them were in development long before Rack Extensions became a thing. Then again NI cater to professionals.

rootwheel
Posts: 290
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25 Feb 2022

ScuzzyEye wrote:
25 Feb 2022
The fact that Authenticator/Reason doesn't know how to follow symlinks on macOS is also baffling. I mean it's been a POSIX standard (the reason Windows has them now) for decades, going on half a century.
This I don't understand. Reason shouldn't really even be aware when looking at ~/Library/Application Support/Propellerhead Software/RackExtensions if it's a symlink to another location or not.

I've been doing some searching and found this:

https://apple.stackexchange.com/questio ... fic-folder

Essentially it's this (where the dev disk number will need to match your external SSD dev disk and partition path):

Code: Select all

sudo diskutil mount -mountPoint ~/Library/Application\ Support/Propellerhead\ Software/RackExtensions /dev/disk5s1
Perhaps using this method will make it possible to mount the root of the external disk as the RackExtensions folder itself at such a low level that Reason is unaware? If the OP wants to give it a try, it might prove more successful than the symlink approach.

rootwheel
Posts: 290
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26 Feb 2022

dremstat wrote:
23 Feb 2022
Hey, thanks to everyone for the suggestions! Unfortunately, the symlink didn't work either. Thinking of asking Reason Support for any other suggestions, suspect they'll tell me it's not possible. Also considering dumping a few Rack Extensions that I barely use anymore. Moving the Optional Devices is a good idea, I tried that a while back and it does work. Again, thanks so much.
Can you try the disk mount approach I've detailed above and let me know if that gets you anywhere? You'll need to have all of your Rack Extension folders that are within your RackExtensions folder copied to the root of your SSD first, then rename your old RackExtensions dir to RackExtensionsOld. Do the command and then see if it works for you when you start Reason....

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integerpoet
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26 Feb 2022

crimsonwarlock wrote:
24 Feb 2022
I don't think it is easy. Adding a path selector in the installer is easy, and putting that setting in a config-file is also easy. However, they obviously hard-coded those disk locations in the software, and they are probably used in hundreds (or more) of code locations. Changing that would be a serious rewrite of large parts of the code base.
That's one of the main reasons symlinks exist.

They've been supported on macOS since forever and on Windows with NTFS since Vista.

Usually, it takes effort to write code which does not support symlinks.

My guess is that if Reason doesn't support them it's probably just a bug.

kitekrazy
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27 Feb 2022

flexluthor wrote:
23 Feb 2022
Every other company lets you store your vsts and libraries off your main disk...... but not reason. Just another reason reason is just falling behind everyone
Waaaaaaaaaaaaay behind. If you are into sample REs a 500GB OS SSD drive is almost needed. I no longer even consider buying them.

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