I always keep mine set to save samples in the project folder. 64gb is so much storage for normal use that I’ve never seen any reason to worry about duplicates and it makes it easier to manage things. If I use something that’s in a set’s audio folder, it gets copied over to the project foder and never have to even think about accidentaly making a change that would mess up other projects on the card - every project is essentially sandboxed from every other project that way. It also means that incremental saves are all completely self contained, so if a project gets corrupted you can roll back to a new copy of your last working version and delete the entire folder ofthe corrupted version without worrying about sample locations (it’s happened to me three times in 5 years, not a lot but enough that I always save as new before I make any major changes to a project AND after I have a project in a “complete” state).
The only reasons I’d ever use the default shared audio pool is if I needed to use multiple LONG samples (like 1-2 hours each) across multiple projects to the degree that using the auio pool would save gigabytes of storage space per project, or if I was using a smaller card (but even the 16gb factory card is a LOT of storage for audio - audio isn’t that big in modern storage terms).
It made a LOT of sense in 2010 when storage was more expensive. In 2023, when you can get an SSD for under $50 that would have cost over a thousand three or four years ago, storage space mostly doesn’t matter much until you start dealing with things like lossless video where even 480p takes something like 60gb per hour.
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