Anyone ever record to a USB flash drive?

AdamWathan

AdamWathan

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Apr 12, 2002
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I was planning on grabbing a 4gb USB stick to run Reaper off of with my VSTs at a buddy's house and was wondering if anyone has tried recording to one of these things? I'm not sure of the technicalities of anything, but I think flash drives are faster than a regular hard drive are they not? Assuming that the USB bandwidth is decent enough to allow maybe 12 tracks of simultaneous recording, would this work okay? 4gb should be enough for what I would use it for and it would be cool to be able to bring my entire DAW and session around on my keychain :lol:
 
It would be better to have two. Put your plugs and Reaper on one, record to a second. Reaper is a beast and can handle anything, I've tried recording to a USB drive (256mb) on accident and it didn't yell at me. Of course, I didn't actually write any data, but it had no problem pointing to the drive as the record destination. Good luck!
 
doc_backmask said:
It would be better to have two. Put your plugs and Reaper on one, record to a second. Reaper is a beast and can handle anything, I've tried recording to a USB drive (256mb) on accident and it didn't yell at me. Of course, I didn't actually write any data, but it had no problem pointing to the drive as the record destination. Good luck!
Click to expand...

Do you think it'll actually make a difference? I was sort of under the impression that once you opened Reaper and your VSTs that they were sitting in your RAM anyways, so the computer wouldn't be accessing them through the USB drive and therefore not using up bandwidth that could be used for the audio stream...
 
F0RBIDDEN said:
Do you think it'll actually make a difference? I was sort of under the impression that once you opened Reaper and your VSTs that they were sitting in your RAM anyways, so the computer wouldn't be accessing them through the USB drive and therefore not using up bandwidth that could be used for the audio stream...
Click to expand...

You'd probably be safe with one, but I like to be extra cautious.
 
Yeah I'm not entirely sure either, I'm no expert by any means, that's just how I thought it worked but I don't know why I thought that really, anyone who knows for sure can chime in any time!

I could probably just install Reaper on my buddy's computer and copy my VSTs over and record to the flash drive, but it would be nice to have everything on a little key.

What size do you guys think I should buy? I was thinking 8gb but to be fair I've never really looked at how much space I'm using on a project... Maybe I should spend the extra $40 for a 16gb drive? I'm not looking to store a whole album on there by any means, but do you guys have an estimate of how much space an actual album would take up? I'm having a hard time imagining it would be more than 12gb or so...
 
I'm not sure about recording stuff, but...my friend has a couple of computer games on an 8gb flash drive and he takes it everywhere with him. Several times he has played his games on the PC at my house without installing anything. One of them is an online game too. So...

You could probably keep your Reaper installer and your plugs all in a zip on the flash and just put that on any PC that you will be working on, and then record directly to the flash key. I don't see why it shouldn't work that way.

~006
 
I have a similar idea. Been thinking of trying to record directly to an sd card. I have a 4gb sd card and my laptop has a inbuilt card reader. Anyone know if the data transfer rate is high enough to record to sd?

I would try it but at present i have no interface for my laptop.
 
well i tried reaper from a usb flashdrive and it loads fine (no chance to record anything yet). Just install it to the drive instead of your pc.
 
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