SOLVED: Can I access Refills on a cloud via Reason's browser???

[challism]

I want to move all my refills to a cloud and free up hard drive space on all my computers. Does anybody know if there is a way to access those refills from Reason's browser? I would love to create a favorites shortcut to my cloud folder. Doesn't seem possible, though. Anybody have any ideas?

[WongoTheSane]

It depends on the combination of which cloud service, and which OS. Some have that natively (for example, Google Drive appears as a folder on Windows, so you can just drag it to your Favorites menu), some others require a specific WebDAV driver to be installed. It's a great idea, so I went and checked my ReFill folder: 100 GB. I'd have to subscribe to 6 different free providers to have that kind of capacity

[challism]

I figured out a good solution for my needs. I installed Odrive. https://www.odrive.com/
I can' add as many of these free providers as I want and they all show up in the same folder.
So you could have all 100GB of your refills split to 6 different free cloud services, and they would all show up in the Reason browser under the Odrive folder. It looks like it works with all the major storage services, google drive, dropbox, onedrive, etc.

This is a great solution to free up some hard drive space on all my computers.

odrive.JPG (27.1 KiB) Viewed 8310 times

od.JPG (45.79 KiB) Viewed 8296 times

[MrFigg]

I figured out a good solution for my needs. I installed Odrive. https://www.odrive.com/
I can' add as many of these free providers as I want and they all show up in the same folder.
So you could have all 100GB of your refills split to 6 different free cloud services, and they would all show up in the Reason browser under the Odrive folder. It looks like it works with all the major storage services, google drive, dropbox, onedrive, etc.

This is a great solution to free up some hard drive space on all my computers.

odrive.JPG
od.JPG

You should do what we did in the olden days and write them all to floppies

[bxbrkrz]

I figured out a good solution for my needs. I installed Odrive. https://www.odrive.com/
I can' add as many of these free providers as I want and they all show up in the same folder.
So you could have all 100GB of your refills split to 6 different free cloud services, and they would all show up in the Reason browser under the Odrive folder. It looks like it works with all the major storage services, google drive, dropbox, onedrive, etc.

This is a great solution to free up some hard drive space on all my computers.

odrive.JPG
od.JPG

Thanks for the tip

[mcatalao]

Mmm... For the price of HD's i think you have a speedier load of sounds if you keep your sounds on your computer. Unless your sounds are very small.

Anyway, i have a cloud but i use it mainly for backups and archiving. Never thought of keeping my sound packages there. I guess one of these days with 1 Gb/ connections you start getting a good speed to access data online, but in reality 1 Gb/s still doesn't compare to a direct access to a normal SSD. And unless you have at least a 500 Mb/s connection, you will always be slower than a normal drive. With refills exceeding 2 to 4 GB's are you going to put the headroom just to save 100 GB of space? I mean, a normal HDD costs you what, 50 eur? It will always be faster than any cloud. IMHO.

[WongoTheSane]

I agree with mcatalao on the principle, but still, you have to admit that challism's solution is rather elegant! Cloud agregators, who would have thought???

[Kypresso]

Seems like a very inventive solution to your problem.

There are still some things that would worry me about it though. Instead of having a single point of failure, your hard drive, you now have 27 potential points of failure. Your home internet connection, the internet in general, odrive and the 24 free cloud services.

Unless you are sitting at the end of a direct fibre connection to the net, you would probably be just as well of sticking the 100GB of refills onto a usb flash drive.
Even usb 2 should be faster than most peoples internet connection.

[challism]

Those are very good points, Krpresso. I keep all my refills backed up on an external hard drive, but I don't like using all that space on each and every computer hard drive I have. I have 4 computers, so it's a lot of wasted space. If I can't access a refill because something in the system is temporarily broken, it's not theend of the world for me. I can just use something else, or pull out my external HDD. This is a good solution for my needs, regardless of one of the added points failing.

Mmm... For the price of HD's i think you have a speedier load of sounds if you keep your sounds on your computer. Unless your sounds are very small.

Also good points you bring up. I'm usually loading patches that are really small, like saved presets or something. I'm not into using other people's loops at all, so the biggest files I would be downloading are the samples for a Kong drum set or something like that. They have been loading lightening fast for me using ODrive. I'm very happy with this solution.

[False Mirror]

I‘m using iCloud Drive to synchronize all Reason projects, patches, my sample libraries, etc between two computers. Works like a charm.

[challism]

Nothing worse (perhaps that is a bit strong) than having duplicate files and patches all over different computers.

[mcatalao]

Also good points you bring up. I'm usually loading patches that are really small, like saved presets or something. I'm not into using other people's loops at all, so the biggest files I would be downloading are the samples for a Kong drum set or something like that. They have been loading lightening fast for me using ODrive. I'm very happy with this solution.

Well, yes and no. I mean, if reason has to grab the whole refill to read a single 1 mb file of 3 GB, you're fracked. You need to test it, because if we were talking about filesystem stuff, that would be ok, because reason would address a single patch. But it's not file system, the address on the refills is inside reason and it might need to load it completely for indexing. Test it. If you see loads are taking too long, you can always go back to HD's.

[mcatalao]

I agree with mcatalao on the principle, but still, you have to admit that challism's solution is rather elegant! Cloud agregators, who would have thought???

No question. It's a very elegant solution. My issue is just it's efficiency (and if it's enough for Challism, i rest my case).

[challism]

I'll just say.... so far so good.... fingers crossed!

Good point about Reason having to grab the whole refill to open up one file.

EDIT: I should also mention that I don't use refills all that much. While I do use them sometimes, I want to have access to them, but I don't want them clogging up hard drive space. So this solution is a good fit. If I used refills in every track, I would probably not go this route.

[Stygian Abyss]

Good point about Reason having to grab the whole refill to open up one file.

Hi Challism, do you have the answer to this question now ? I'd like to relocate my ReFills on a shared USB drive on my network just like I recently did with some individual wave files based sample packs. Does it also work correctly with a compressed archive format like ReFills ?

[moneykube]

You should do what we did in the olden days and write them all to floppies

WHAT ???? Floppies are not a thing any more..... hmmmm... shocking

[Kilsane]

I use OneDrive on Windows and Mac OS, all my refills are on it and it works without any problem

[DaveyG]

You should do what we did in the olden days and write them all to floppies

WHAT ???? Floppies are not a thing any more..... hmmmm... shocking

I've got a floppy but it might be my age. Not sure how much data it will reliably retain though.

[moneykube]

WHAT ???? Floppies are not a thing any more..... hmmmm... shocking

I've got a floppy but it might be my age. Not sure how much data it will reliably retain though.

ha... 1 mb( 0r .08 of a mb> can't quite remember)... and the disks are very unreliable from memory... I had countless die back in the day of floppies... don't miss them for sure.... today one mb is like a very, very, very small drop in a large lake.... Have some Amiga computers that use them and they worked last time I checked a number of years ago... I hear there is a market for old Amigas.., I have 4 here... one for parts

[arnigretar]

I use external hd and it's connected to dropbox and all my refills are stored there -- over 200GB. No problem Use this both for Macbook and my Windows PC's.

About floppies: I still use them In the old days it was for everything. But the last 15 years or so it has been for my samplers. I still like to use them since it limits me what I sample each time.

[challism]

Good point about Reason having to grab the whole refill to open up one file.

Hi Challism, do you have the answer to this question now ? I'd like to relocate my ReFills on a shared USB drive on my network just like I recently did with some individual wave files based sample packs. Does it also work correctly with a compressed archive format like ReFills ?

Yes, I would guess that you can do the same thing with an external drive on a network... that's really all cloud storage is, after all, and it works just fine.

Unfortunately, there really isn't a way to unpack a refill (except by doing it manually, which would take forever to go thru a library). One thing you can do is save the files (patches, samples, etc) that you like/are using to disk (self-contain settings will save them in the *.REASON file). Otherwise, you pretty much have to download the entire refill.

This cloud based solution works for someone who doesn't use refills that much, but still wants to have access to them.

[Stygian Abyss]

Thanks to all those who replied me, I'll try it.

[moofi]

Besides the online storage why don´t you simply get a NAS all your computers have access to, so you wouldn´t have to multiply across.

EDIT: sry, didn´t finish reading

Hi Challism, do you have the answer to this question now ? I'd like to relocate my ReFills on a shared USB drive on my network just like I recently did with some individual wave files based sample packs. Does it also work correctly with a compressed archive format like ReFills ?

Yes, I would guess that you can do the same thing with an external drive on a network... that's really all cloud storage is, after all, and it works just fine.

Unfortunately, there really isn't a way to unpack a refill (except by doing it manually, which would take forever to go thru a library). One thing you can do is save the files (patches, samples, etc) that you like/are using to disk (self-contain settings will save them in the *.REASON file). Otherwise, you pretty much have to download the entire refill.

This cloud based solution works for someone who doesn't use refills that much, but still wants to have access to them.

[Stygian Abyss]

Besides the online storage why don´t you simply get a NAS all your computers have access to, so you wouldn´t have to multiply across.

EDIT: sry, didn´t finish reading

Obviouly.
But this was not a bad advice at all, and it works perfectly.