Second partition - access to music? Windows!
I’m about to create a second Win7 partition solely to run Traktor on, since it seems a wise thing to do. I wonder, however, how you all keep your music in sync on both partitions. Do you all keep your music on an external HDD, or is there a more elegant solution? I really want it all on my internal drive, I don’t feel like plugging in something just to hear a tune.
Thanks for your suggestions!
I keep most everything I actually play on the local drive. I have an external drive with a bigger selection connected just in case (requests). Record crates only contain local files. In the event I have to navigate to the USB drive, I end up adding those files locally after the gig.
I’m plugging the audio8 in anyway, so plugging a USB drive is not a big deal.
If however I were DJing while riding a bike, I would not connect the external drive. 
An external drive in a crystal case hanging above the booth would be quite elegant btw. 
I have 2 Windows 7 64 bit partitions on my desktop. One as a Music Studio partition and one for general use. That is, one for Ableton, Reason, Traktor etc etc and the other for browsing, email, games etc.
I store all my music on an external hard drive. However, the songs I know I use in mixes, I copied into my studio partition. That way, I get quick access to them without needing the external drive, but my entire music collection is also stored on the external drive if I do need access to it.
I installed Windows 7 on first partition. Shrunk the partition via Disk Manager in Windows 7 and left it unallocated. Then, restarted, popped in the disc and then installed the second OS onto the unallocated partition, formatting it in the process. Then, I used EasyBCD 2.0.2 to name the two OS clearly so I don;t get mixed up. Otherwise they both show up as “Windows 7” in the boot menu.
Also, on my laptop I also have 2 Windows partitions, one with Windows XP Pro 32 bit and the other a Windows 7 32 bit with the same principles. For this process, I followed this instruction (parts of which you can emulate if installing two Windows 7 partitions):
Windows XP and Windows 7 Dual Boot Tutorial
I also have 2 partitions,in my laptop: first for WinVista & Traktor (20GB) ;second for mp3s(230GB); I can get a latency of 11.5ms with perfect clear sound, I never tried using an external hard drive, but I’ve tried flashPENs (1/4/8GB) and if I play the tracks directly from the PEN I get some cracks&pops…
So… recently I noticed I was running out of space in 1st partition because of traktor recordings, I moved the folder to 2nd partition and noticed 1st partition only has about 3GB free, I only use this laptop for traktor djing,all Win. unwanted programs were removed.
Should I make the 1st partition larger?if so what size?
thank you
Asus Dual Core 2.4ghz/3GB + WinVista Home + Audio DJ2 + VCI-100 mk1 + Traktor Pro 1.2.7
@Nosferatu: it’s not really an internal vs. external hdd discussion, I’m just trying to figure out how people keep their music synchronised across different partitions - don’t think we’re on the same page here.
@Bunford: I already have to do quite some effort to keep my music libraries organised & synchronised with my internal 1-partition setup, I don’t think I could handle your setup. I add new songs to my library on a fairly regular basis, I’d just completely lose track of which songs are imported already and which ones aren’t. Too bad there doesn’t seem to be a proper alternative though…
@partyboy: yeah sure, there are some tools available that can resize your partitions, make sure to backup first though, operations like these always have chance of failure. 40-50 gb seems like a reasonable primary partition to me.