February 06, 2018  -  #TipTuesday - Installing the Band-in-a-Box® Hard Drive Versions

Have you purchased a Band-in-a-Box® UltraPAK, which ships on a portable USB hard drive? Once received, there are a few different options for you: Run Band-in-a-Box® directly from the USB drive only, Install Band-in-a-Box® on your computer hard drive (but leave the RealTracks and RealDrums on the USB hard drive), Install Band-in-a-Box® AND RealTracks on your computer hard drive, or choose a Custom Installation!

To summarize these options:

Option #1 - Run Band-in-a-Box® directly from the USB drive only. This allows you to use the hard drive "as is" and run the programs from it. It requires very little free disk space on your internal hard drive. Setup will install and register the PG Music notation fonts, VSC-DXi synth, VSC-VST synth, and PG Music DirectX audio plugins on your computer, but will not install Band-in-a-Box®, RealBand, RealTracks, or RealDrums on your computer's internal hard drive.

Option #2 - Install Band-in-a-Box® on your computer hard drive, but leave the RealTracks and RealDrums on the USB hard drive. This requires more hard disk space, about 2 to 4 GB. In addition to the plugins and fonts, this will install the Band-in-a-Box® and RealBand programs to your computer's hard drive, and allow you to run the programs from there, as if you had installed them from a DVD.

Option #3 - Install Band-in-a-Box® AND RealTracks on your computer hard drive. In addition to everything installed by Option 2, this will copy the RealTracks and RealDrums (Drums) folders from the USB drive to your computer's hard drive, as if you had installed the entire package from DVD. This will allow you to keep the PG Music hard drive primarily for backup, and use Band-in-a-Box® and RealBand (along with the RealTracks) directly from your computer hard drive. NOTE: This option requires a lot of free hard disk space (over 80 GB) since these folders contain many audio files, and the installation may take about an hour to complete depending on how fast your computer is.

Option #4 - Custom Installation - Choose exactly what you want to install. This option is for advanced users who want to be able to select exactly what is installed. For example, you could install RealDrums but not RealTracks, or skip the DX plugins, or install the Video Tutorials, etc.

For more detailed information, visit http://www.pgmusic.com/techfaq51.htm#163

No matter how you install and use your Band-in-a-Box® hard drive, make sure you're saving your songs (or a copy of them) to your own folder not on the hard drive - that way you'll have a back-up copy if your hard drive isn't available to you!

Posted on February 6, 2018 09:13 AM