A common situation that many producers find themselves in is having a ton of samples or libraries and two computers on which they want to use them. In order to better manage this, they'll use one external hard drive (which should be an SSD) and store all of their content on that drive. This guide will cover how you can configure Splice INSTRUMENT to handle this exact scenario, and explain the tradeoffs of doing so.
On the First System:
To do so, first install all content you want to use on your primary machine. You'll want to ensure your content location is correctly set to the external drive that you want to use.
Once all the content has been installed on the first device, navigate to your INSTRUMENT.locations file.
Windows: %APPDATA%\com.splice.Instrument\INSTRUMENT.locations
macOS: ~/Library/Application Support/com.splice.INSTRUMENT/INSTRUMENT.locations
Copy and paste (not move or delete) this file to your shared location on the external drive.
On the Second System:
Move your external drive to the second system. Open up Splice INSTRUMENT and change the Content Location on this system to the same external drive location as your first system. Then quit Splice INSTRUMENT.
Navigate to the path above for you INSTRUMENT.locations file on the second system. Drag your INSTRUMENT.locations file that you copied from the first system into this location on the second system, replacing the file that was present there.
Reopen Splice INSTRUMENT and you should find all of the content you had installed on the first system available and ready to play on the second system. If you are not seeing any content, just click Download on that pack again and the files will be found while reinstalling.
Limitations:
Unfortunately this is not a foolproof system, and there are some things to be aware of when trying to configure your systems for this.
Any content installed from a different system will not be managed by INSTRUMENT, this means you won't be able to move or delete the content from the second system, only from the system that did the original installation.
The devices will not remain in sync with each other, you'll need to either install any new content on both devices (the download will be skipped on the second device as long as the files are found), or recopy the
INSTRUMENT.locationsfile to the second system whenever you install new content.Presets created with Craft cannot be shared in this way.
Sharing content across different operating systems (macOS/Windows) will not work like this. If this is the situation you are in, please reach out to let us know so that we can prioritize a solution for you if need be.