I recently went through my entire +drive trying to make room, and here’s what I found:
If you haven’t updated your DT to the most recent firmware, then elk.herd is extremely helpful for this.
When you load up a project in elk.herd, you can click on any Pattern and it will show you what Samples are used in it. You can also click on any Sample and it’ll highlight all the Patterns where it’s used. (Although it gets confused by “plocked” samples.)
So if you can, I suggest opening every project in elk.herd and taking a screen shot of its latest state of samples/patterns before you Transfer it.
Once you reload everything back onto the deck, you can also use elk.herd to see if there are any missing samples. You’ll know them because they’ll be called something like “- - -”.
Transfer doesn’t like it when you try to grab everything at once. You’ll end up getting crashes and errors. It’s annoying, but I’d suggest copying each project or folder one-by-one.
That way you can make sure they transfer properly without your eyes pouring out of your face. Put on a good TV show or some sports or something take it slow.
As others have said, Transfer will copy all the samples you use in a project into the “.dtproj” files it creates, which are just .zips with a fancy name. This means you can see what’s in each Project pretty easily after you copy it over. All you have to do on a Mac is change the file name from “.dtproj” to “.zip” and then unzip it like any other folder.
Keep in mind that means that a folder full of .dtproj files can get big after a while, because they’ll each have their own copy of whatever .wavs you use in that project.
Also, remember that Transfer won’t transfer over any .wavs from the DT’s original Factory folders. I wasted hours and hours once looking through my sample library for a missing sample that turned out to be a DT factory one, which means it never got copied over.
The hashtag system is pretty good at recognizing samples, all your patterns should load up with the samples used in them, and there shouldn’t be any duplicates created on the +drive.
So, putting this all together — theoretically if you want to clean all the unused samples out of your DT and keep only ones you’ve used, all you have to do is:
- Use Transfer to offload all your projects,
- then clear any samples or folders you want to get rid of,
- and then drag those projects back onto the DT.
THAT SAID!!! I’ve done a complete data rip-and-replace of my DT a few times, trying to scrounge for space, and there’ve been couple places here and there were samples seemed to go missing. Not sure why.
But I did have to them hunt them down, which was annoying but actually not impossible. Again, elk.herd helps a ton here if you’re a version back.
Oh, and also—I don’t really use the Sounds library so I have no idea how any of this applies to Sounds. Just Projects. Sorry!
Hope all this helps!