After a few years producing, I’ve got to that point where I’m wondering if a format of the production machine is something worth doing.
I’ve got loads of sample packs, VSTs and the like and they’re a bit randomly organised. Part of me fancies simplifying my setup a bit. One way of doing this would be to have a complete reset and reinstall only the stuff that comes to mind as being important. The alternative would be to just move some less important/used stuff onto an external drive.
Has anyone done this? Does it clear the decks for you (literally or mentally) or was it more hassle than it was worth?
Ive done it several times. I keep duplicates of everything as well. I have narrowed it down to my favourite goto plugins and kept the rest as subs on a seperate drive. Its quite liberating as you can get bogged down with too much software.
If you’re on Mac then it’s pretty easy. You have a TM backup, so that’s a great start. If you have licenses installed on the machine then you need to take care to see they are properly restored, or go to the effort to deregister the machine and then relicense what you need, else you run the risk of having them get stuck on the previous install. It depends on the way the vendor does licensing. Some use the machine’s hardware ID so will have no problem being moved back on the fresh install, but others are software keys, so do your due diligence to make sure you’re not getting locked out of anything.
Other than that, a Mac is pretty easy to maintain even without having to reinstall the whole OS. Most of the cruft that accumulates in the ~/Library folder can be deleted manually without much trouble. You know your machine and setup best, so do what feels most comfortable.
I recently did a complete fresh install on my Mac. It’s quite nice to start afresh. I actually swapped to an external SSD so I can go back to my old setup if I want.
What was the one thing I’d forgotten to do before moving to a fresh install? Deauthorise all my plugins.
I’d you’re going to format and start again, make sure you have this in hand first!
Yesterday the internal SSD in my old MacBook decided to freak out after upgrading the RAM and made the computer unbootable. Seeing this as an opportunity (having multiple backups to hand anyway) I did a fresh install of OSX. Coming round to reinstalling the music software I realised I hadn’t been able to deauth the iLok plugins beforehand. As an experiment I redownloaded the License Manager and installed it. After signing in the plugins which were previously registered to the computer were still there! So all is not lost as long as you have access to the same machine in some way. This isn’t intended as a guide BTW, just a tale about experiencing something unexpected and possibly just luck.
The main thing I forgot to do was backup some projects but as others here mentioned, Time Machine solves all in those cases, and actually I wanted the clean slate so I’m running with it. The only one I was careful with was Soundtoys which seemed like it could be a few days with support if you press the wrong button. So I just assigned it to iLok, rather than machine activation. I have other plugins there, so I was always going to have to use it anyway. Soundtoys is in the “never sell” category at this point so I’ll live with the iLok for that. And most of the others I was able to de-auth on a website or similar.
The main issue was re-installing the things I wanted, which even with heavy minimisation might still too much. But the pain of doing it one by one basically meant that I left a lot out. By my reckoning I cut my plugins by 75% (and even that could be cut by another 1/3 potentially.) What I tried to get it down to was 1-2 plugins in each category, which I mostly succeeded at (though I do appear to have an addiction to multi-effect mangling things.)
Well worth doing I’d say overall, and next time hopefully it’ll be even less painful if I can minimise the quantity of stuff to transfer.
Just to add to this as well. I forgot to deauthorise ilok as well recently.
You can select those plugins via ilok and it will send a request to all vendors and they can do a manual reset also. Most have done this for me. It isn’t instant though. Many took days with others a few weeks.
If this is about Windows - I was on Windows 8.1 for like 8 years without a single reinstall and on Windows 10 for like 5-6 years, so performance-wise there is no much point.
However with plugins, etc it makes some sense to clean-up (it’s such a mess, I bought some plugins recently and not very happy with endless licenses and multiple installation folders for VST2, VST3, VST3-64, omg).
What is more important - to get rid of the manufacturers bloatware cluttering the system. I always start from a blank slate and remove anything bundled (in case it’s a laptop).
For Mac - totally different story though.
