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Thumb Drives
So with the release of another Gospel Musician app I am thinking I might need to finally get an external drive to store my GM data.
I’m thinking 128GB will be sufficient and will give me plenty of room for other stuff.
I know I can get something like a Sandisk SSD but I like the idea of something thumb-drive sized. It would need to work via a CCK.
Anyone have any recommendations?
Or am I better off using something like the Sandisk?
Thanks
Comments
Good luck using all of that. Many drives the with iPad and the CCK can’t supply enough power. If you have a USB C iPad you should be fine. You might need the lightning to USB 3 adapter to add the lightning to power it. If you are lucky that can sometimes work. You may need to go as far as using a powered hub just to connect up the device.
Definitely check around whatever model you are trying to use to see if it connects without having to jump through hoops with powered hubs, etc. if you use one in your set up already then no big deal. Keep that in mind.
Per the App Store description, you need to use an SSD drive. Thumb drives and SD cards won't work for this (I think they don't stream reliably with iDevices).
Take a look at the image below, mentions thumb drive:
…and message from @GospelMusicians said to me:
“Thumb drive option has always been implemented on all of our apps. Is this not working for you?”
I’ll tell you what works for me: Samsung T5 SSD (not the T7, which reportedly gets too hot). Using the 2TB model and it is a total lifesaver. Keep in mind that the T5 is too slow to stream from though, so if you want to do what they advertise you’ll probably want to get a traditional spinning disk.
Thank you! I’m eying this little SSD:
JOIOT 120G Portable External SSD USB 3.1 Type C Flash Drive External Solid State Drive, Portable SSD Type A to C Cable for PC/Laptop/Mac/Android/Linux https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08CV6Z1NW/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_glt_fabc_BK70R8Q0J21BEZ6S3S84?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1
I suppose you’d have to compare this drive against a traditional hard drive to make sure it would do exactly what you intend it to do. Maybe even ask Gospel Musicians what they recommend for an external drive for iPad?
That's interesting -- the Neo-Soul Keys Studio 2 lists thumb drives as not working (see below).
Yup, very confusing
I tried my iXpand thumb drive Xtreme, no dice.
I am curious if anyone here has gotten it to work with a thumb drive. On my iPad 2018, I have a fast MicroSD card but used with the iPad is super slow -- much slower than when I use it with my ancient MacBook Pro that also is USB2 -- but the SSD drive that I have tried is much faster. Very strange -- but I haven't tried either with Neo-Soul because I find the drives a hassle to use (due to the need for power).
If I understand the terminology correctly and thumb drive is that small USB thing, I think you should avoid it due to reliability. All (that I used) failed sooner than later. I'd go with the Sandisk SSD or similar, seriously.
Yea the bigger th3 drive the more u will need a powered usb hub in the mix. I get my 4gb, 16gb, 128gb, thumb drives and a 256 SSD to work with no power supply but my 1TB & 2TB sea gate hd need power.
In previous comment, Just speaking in general not music apps specifically.
T5 and T7 working just fine here fwiw.
And I use the CCK with the second charging port. Not sure if that helps the power situation in any way but it seems too.
Yes this is the CCK model I have. Sounds like I’ll be safest with an SSD
Partly related to this I’d find it handy to have USB storage which would ideally power from my iPad 8 + USB3 CCK with no external power, or failing that with power connected to the CCK. The hard and thumb drives I have around all require a powered hub, but the thumb drives in particular are quite old.
I’m VERY confused, please enlighten me cos this iOS file system thing is extremely unclear. We’ve talked about this in many occasions. I remember @wim commenting on the file sandboxes, having to copy the same file over and over, etc…
So the question is: Can an iOS app stream samples from an external hard drive???.
I thought you couldn’t, and here we are…
AudioLayer can’t, Drambo can’t, Zenbeats can’t… I cant think of an app that can. You have to copy the files to the app directory (sandbox) which is a waste of time and makes external storage pretty much useless.
Here comes this Gospel Musician that seems to be able to stream from an external drive… I believe FAC Drumkit can also use samples from outside its “sandbox”. This is a huge deal.
So where are we?
Gospel Musicians have supported streaming from an SSD for a couple of years. Apps have to add the functionality. Just because something is possible doesn't mean that it makes sense economically for a developer to put the time into making it work.
So Drambo could stream from disk if they wanted to implement it?. And AudioLayer, and Zenbeats and… I’m in shock. It really, really sucks that they don’t implement this. I’m tired of duplicating samples and copying folders over and over again.
Keep in mind that while you might love to have a feature, the person that has to implement it also wants to be compensated for their time. They may have good reasons for not implementing something that might seem like a no-brainer to you.
Obviously I don’t know how hard it is to implement it, but I was really surprised cos I thought it was a limitation of the app sandbox limitation imposed by iOS.
I assume this is not only about external drives but that it also applies to folders inside “My IPad” in the file system. I wouldn’t call it a “no brainer” but I’m pretty sure it’s a big deal for anyone that works with samples and loops. I would put it at the top of feature requests for any of those apps and I’d happily pay an IAP for this. Good news is that it’s actually possible!.
Adding the support for accessing files outside the app sandbox is very easy. But, there are a couple of potential issues for audio apps. You have no control over what the user plugs in as a drive. Some will work well, but many will cause problems when trying to stream audio from disk. The dev is going to have to deal with a whole bunch of new support issues.
The other issue is that this capability wasn't there when many audio apps were started. So, the idea wasn't taken into account when the apps were designed. Audio companies in particular seem to be very slow at updating their software even when adding the support is nearly trivial. As far as I can tell, most AUv3's still don't support the host-to-AU preset management that Apple added years ago now.
Nice info, thanks. I can understand that supporting external drives must be a headache, but as I said the same would apply for a sample folder in the iPad… right?. Like “my iPad/samples-dir”. External drives would be ideal for large sample libraries but to me being able to go beyond the sandbox thing is a must for a logical workflow.
Yeah, it works the same for accessing directories outside your sandbox on an external drive or on the internal storage. But, that's where the complications start. The app doesn't know where the directory it's been granted permission to use is, so you need to do all the error handling and related stuff even if the directory is on the local drive. And then since there can be various different types of files that could be malformed etc., you need to have the error handling for that too. Since lots of these apps existed before these capabilities were added, I'd guess that at least some did the error handling in the prep of the samples or on initial import. So, they would need to add some logic for handling bad files at access. Still, this really should be done now by apps if they are still under active development (if you ask me).
There's another possible path that could make working with sample libraries between multiple apps easier/possible, but that would take cooperation and coordination between the various companies and depends on Apple granting the entitlement to any dev that wanted to use it. I kinda don't see this working unless maybe it is pushed by Apple themselves.
Having been on the providing support to people who accidentally destroyed their sample libraries side, I think the support aspect is pretty huge. While sandboxing may seem like a royal unnecessary pain to people with decent file managements skills: most of the world is really bad at file management. I had a client (a desktop music app developer) whose app had an embedded multi-sampler. Initially, the sampler was informally sandboxed (you could trick it into using samples outside of its home directory). At some point, the decision was made to make it easier to use people's existing sample libraries -- and the support nightmare began. For starters, people would inadvertently periodically move the sample files or sample directories without realizing it. Or, they would re-organize their folders or samples or rename them. Eventually, we had to implement a search strategy and u.i. for handling those situations.
We started out assuming that people would know that you can't just move things around and expect apps to find them. But, no, people expect apps to transparently deal with that (the overwhelming majority of users are happily unaware of how file systems work). There are strategies to do that -- but they all take time to implement. And, people complain and are unhappy if they aren't perfect.
Sadly, a couple of people complaining loudly and publicly (one star app review anyone?) can really hurt an app -- so I can understand why if you have something slightly inconvenient that works well, you might not try to implement something that a small portion of your users will use but can backfire badly.
Not to mention that even if the dev does everything right, the external devices themselves are hit-and-miss and as unfair as it seems -- the devs will often get the flack for those problems.
On the plus side, it does seem like the iOS 'virtual files' thing works pretty well. So, all those copies don't gobble up storage space in most cases.
Since they have much higher transfer speeds they are definitely the best option. There’s also a small discussion in the new MKSensation thread. The developer said that the app and all their apps should work with thumb drives. I’ve gotten thumb drives on sale at Walmart for $1-$5. So it could be worth a shot if you get one on the cheap. But yea, SSD are definitely preferred and will probably provide better performance.
I have a couple of small but high quality (Buffalo) thumbdrives (4 and 8 GB, USB 2) that transfer about 1 GByte within 1 minute. The same transfer on a regular budget drive takes half an hour. The Buffalos are about 10years old, the 8GB was $150 back then...
Mileage with these devices may vary a lot
@NeonSilicon
Is there a way to trick non supported apps to read off an external?
Like with shortcuts?
I believe djay pro makes reference files on the ipad for files on the external when you add to the library. Possible to make a bunch of shortcuts (on a mac), specify the path to the external, then copy the shortcuts to the ipad?
Kinda wondering if this would work for somethig like audiolayer and keep my exs24 libraries on the external.
Or does iOS have some different mechanism to keepig track of mounted drives than os x does?
I don't know for sure, I've never tried, but I doubt it. As far as I know, iOS is doing the same things that macOS can do using APFS. If you look at how an iOS app works on macOS the sandboxed apps have a volume mounted in the APFS container. The rest is handled through the permissions on the volumes. All access is going through the OS, so I don't think any app that isn't directly asking for the file system handles through the OS is going to be able to follow any symbolic links that aren't part of the granted permissions.
The point of all of this is security, so even if you could figure out a hole in the system, it wouldn't be reliable as it would be patched eventually.
Haven't tried with iOS, but by far the best USB stick I've found is this one:
https://www.amazon.de/-/en/Speedy-128GB-SuperSpeed-Flash-Memory/dp/B07VS8WFF5/
I have a couple of the 256GB size (cost just under €50 apiece when I got them about a year ago) and I have no complaints. Quick, big, cheap and light.