Cleaning your mac? & external hard drives

Hello guys! This post is about cleaning you mac & external hard drives.
I have not had my mac book all that long nearly a year. I am wondering what you guys delete of your mac to keep the hard drive clean and running fast. Also what's the deal with external hard drives for your music? I have a 250 gig hard drive and used 62GB of it. My itunes has about 2000 tunes in it not had a problem yet,but the key lock in T pro can sound a little funny on sum tunes. Is this ok should i get a external HD and put the musik on that? and how exactly does this benefit you? Can some one tell if there is any must and must not delete from my hard drive? And i am looking for a hard drive that does not require a power cable and runs off firewire,
Any and all info is greatly appreciated.
Thanks to The DJTT for all there work,changing from vinyl to digital was a bit overwhelming at first but i understand a lot of it now because of this site. Thankx

Dude why are you even thinking of an external drive. ?
You have a big Internal drive (250gig) with loads of room. Do not get an external drive this will lead to more worries than using the internal. The Hard Drive is not slowing Traktor down and is not making Traktor sound funny. It must be something else...
What exactly does "sound funny" mean ?
There are better solutions to fixing your problem than going External.

Tell us what problems your having.


In the mean time:
The best advice i EVER took was to use MAC JANITOR.
This gets rid of all the Internet gunk that collects on your Mac. I know plenty of people who use it and it makes a huge difference. All you do is run Mac Janitor before you use Traktor and your good to go.

It free: http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/10491

If the keylock is sounding funny you should try upping the latency a little bit.

Keeping music on an external drive is good for a lot of reasons. Mainly, though, it's a backup in case something happens to your laptop, you don't lose your music. Also, external hard drives can get a lot bigger than your internal drives.

As to connection, it really depends on you. 6 pin firewire can transmit power, as can USB 2.0, so it just depends on your available ports and power needs. They sell USB powered external hard drives.

That's about what I can answer as I won't even attempt to help you navigate a Mac's file system. But I'm sure you can find a lot of resources with some google searches if people here don't get you the info

Thanks for the info guys, I will try Mac Janitor see what that does.

You said upping the latency a bit what should the Audio 8 be set too?

The funny sound i was on about is kinda like a chirping digital noise but it only happens on some tunes, Got an idea it could be because some of the tunes are at a lower Kbps or the just could be crap quality going to experiment see if i can figure it out.

The latency setting is different for every computer. Just up it little by little until you get a point where no errors come through.

You should be fine :)

I run all of my music off of an external FW800 drive including Logic projects which I'd imagine are more intensive than Traktor's requirements. The drive requires power but it's fast. I did a speed test and it runs faster through an identical VM than the 7200RPM internal HD in my 2.4ghz MBPro. Maybe the new MB motherboards have better drive throughput now though.

I use an App called "Main Menu"

Probably does all the things the janitor one does though, disk permissions etc, browser cache and history stuff like that

+1k with Main Menu

I have found that running my audio from an external FW400 drive improved performance for me a great deal because my internal was a 5400RPM drive, running a 7200RPM FW drive made everything run faster and smoother in Live where I perform and in Digital Performer where I have 3&4 GB's of audio for one song sometimes.

what speed is your internal drive? if its 5400rpm you may want to look at a 7200rpm internal or external replacement.

drive speed can make a huge difference in ableton and DP, never used traktor though so I dont know if it affects things the same.