Never do #1: SSD plug and play

Let’s be honest. In this era of huge music sample libraries we can’t do without any good and fast SSD. Last week I bought a new one. Coming to a total storage of 3 TB of SSD. But I forgot something to do which turned my weekend into a hell. Welcome to the #1 of the Never do series!

New library, new SSD storage

I could not resist. I simply could not resist. Could you? I guess not! Who can resist a 50% discount on the amazing Spitfire Audio Chamber Strings during the Apex challenge.

They had me in the first second I heard about the competition. I had my eyes on this library for quite some time. The whopping 999 euros for the professional edition was a bit too much for me. But with a 50% discount it entered into my range of budget.

Before I knew it the library sat in my basket. I clicked the checkout button and paid. Without any hesitation. The only thing I needed then, was a new SSD drive for this enormous library (312GB uncompressed .wav).

Samsung T5 1GB SSD

I’m a lucky bastard. Besides the discount on Chamber Strings Professional, I found a discount on the Samsung T5 1GB also! Never used that brand before (I normally use Lacie or Sandisk), but the comments for this particular hard drive were very good.

The next day the postman delivered the package. A tiny black T5 became part of my music production gear. I plugged it in my iMac and started to download chamber strings. And went for a walk with the dog.

Clicks, pops and lousy export

A night passed. I stood up early. I couldn’t wait to play around with my new library. But before I would start a session with Chamber Strings I reordered some of my existing libraries between my SSD hard drives.

Also I wanted to export the stems of a project I was working on. The composition was done, it needed to be mixed.

Then I noticed I had a problem. The stems I exported contained clicks, pops and audio loss. I’ve tried everything to solve this. It really drove me nuts. Whatever I did, the clicks, pops and audio loss stayed.

I googled, I read many many threads and articles. But I was searching in the wrong direction. I thought it had something to do with Logic Pro X. And that was not the case.

exFAT versus Mac OS Extended (journaled)

Eventually I realized that the libraries on my new Samsung T5 were causing issues. The ones on my Sandisk drive worked correctly. Then lighting struck.

I work with Apple. That’s a choice I made many years ago. Giving me lots of benefits. And sometimes some irritating boundaries or issues.

Working with Apple means you would like to work with a hard drive which is formatted optimally for this particular system. And you guess it correctly now: the T5 was formatted in exFAT. Not in the Mac OS Extended (journaled).

Moral of the story

To save yourself a lot of frustration and irritation, always REFORMAT AN NEW SSD/HD hard drive! How simple can it be. So simple that I missed it completely. Don’t make that same mistake!