I’ve reached the point that I can no longer tolerate the behavior of BBManager Drumset Maker. I’ve embarked on a project of reorganization my attached storage in my Mac Pro. For sake of argument, let’s just say I have about 24TB of attached storage. The real number is unimportant. What is important, however, is that I recently upgraded my system drive SSD from a 2TB SSD to the 4TB SSD. I was running out of space on the 2TB SSD. How can that be? Well here is an example. I decided to see how many sets of WAVES folder I have generated for a particular drumkit. And to be very fair and reasonable, I chose the Studio Legend kit, because I really have not used it much yet, much less tried to open it an edit it. A search of my HD showed that I had 2 folders called Studio Legend v1.0 WAVES. 1 of those is embedded 24 folder deep in various other BB drum kit folders. Another was the the back-up copy of that HD which, of course, also shows a 24 deep embedded folder. this was reasonable and expected, other than the 24 deep issue. However, when I then double clicked on Studio Legend in my drum kits list, it created another instance of the Studio_Legend v.1.0_WAVES, also embedded 24 folders deep in another BB kit. So, I decided to see what was at the top level of this mess.
In my Document, a folder exists called Default_lib. Inside there is one called Drumsets. When I click drumsets open I see:
This is a fairly small list of some of the drumsets in my BB projects. There are 45 kits shown. I decided to see how big the drumsets folder was. Reasonably, 45 kits should be a max of 4.5 GB, assuming 100mb per kit. But, here it is, Yup, 48.2GB. 48.2 GB. And that was just from searching for one folder. How many other strings of crap are out there on my HDs?
If everytime I click a kit to look at it or edit it, BBM creates a new set of kit WAVES, I must have several TB of just BB WAVES from kits. And can I delete them? I don’t know. How would I know which ones I can delete without messing up BBM?
Not sure why the whole WAV file automatic extraction was created in the first place. Perhaps it is necessary when opening drumsets for editing. Perhaps not.
Just delete all content from your WAV folder and you will be done. None of those files are needed for anything. This is something that will be addressed (along with many other issues) for future BB Manager updates.
No problem, Phil.
There should be a single wav_sources folder inside your user_lib folder. There is also one inside default_lib.
Both of them are in BBWorkspace folder.
Thanks, Goran. Yeah, those are OK. It’s the hundreds of other ones that have self created Inside of other kits, and really inside other miscellaneous folders in the HD that are an issue. I can hunt them all down using the MacOS find feature, so it just takes time. It’s just good to know that I can delete them without causing a problem within BB Manager. That’s why I haven’t done it before. I’m sure I have several kits where I have more than 20 instances of the WAVES folder that were generated.
That is really weird that you have various instances in other locations of your computer. That should not be the case. They should only be extracted in those 2 folders. Definitely something that will need to be looked at.
Thanks for reporting this!
Phil Ingber and I have been reporting this behavior for a couple years. It seems that when you open a kit a for editing, rather than creating a set of waves in the BB Workspace, as BB Manager should, it seems to create the set of waves wherever you might have been working or editing last. In many instances, these new sets of waves are embedded 20 or more folders deep in the hard drive. It’s a mess. Starting over with a new BB Workspace does not correct the problem. In point of face, my BB Workspace wave_sources folder is empty. This problem started with one of the firmware updates I believe in 2017, although it may have been earlier.
Yes, very very very annoying. My hard drive is also cluttered with these folders and files. In fact so annoying that, now the BBM code is open-sourced, I took some time to look through the code and I think I found the problem. Looks to be a simple fix which I’ve reported to them. Let’s hope a new version is actually released sometime…
That code change really makes sense, and it does look like the root of the problem. It would be really nice to see an early result from this open source project with some changes made to the real problematic issues.
I can concur that this is a nuisance, at the very least, or a crippling issue if you are running out of disc storage. I am already at 7GB of waves files, a lot of duplicates (and triplicates) there.
I, for one, really appreciate having the wav files created in the first place. For some of us that are beginning to edit drms, it helps by providing some useful sounds that we can use to edit or create new drum sets. So I, for one, would not like if this feature (wav files being created when opening or editing drum sets in the BBManager) goes away in a new version of BBManager.
What is really annoying is having to search for those wav files 20 folders deep inside a random “instrument” of a drumset that is already inside another instrument of another drumset.
I think I have read elsewhere on the forum that if I deleted the wav files, some drum sets will not play right. Am I mistaken?
I ask because I am thinking that a way to free some space could be by deleting all wavs (after creating a copy somewhere else), and, if necessary, re-importing all drms again (if, in fact, they don’t play as they should). Hopefully, deleting the wavs does not affect playback and the re-importing of drms won’t be necessary.
Any ideas or comments or experience managing this issue?
Thanks.
Actually Goran weighed in on this issue at one time, and advised that the wav file folders are NOT required for proper system operation. The necessary files are already embedded in the .drm file. If you are able to track down an unnecessary folder, you can delete it without fear.
These folders were supposed to wind up inside the BBWorkspace folder, but during some revision, this process of creating the folder at obscure locations began, and this has never been fixed.
I will test this.
Actually, all my duplicates are still inside the BBWorkspace folder, inside the user_lib/wave_sources folder (as far as I know).
I will make a copy, just in case, delete the content of wave_sources and will report back, hopefully soon.
Thanks Phil
I just looked at my current BBWorkspace, and it appears to be organized correctly. Kits are in there, and the wav files are in there. While the proliferation problem was going on, this did not happen. The WAV files did not appear in the BB Workspace. I updated to the 4.01 firmware, not too long ago. It could be that the proliferation problem is resolved. In any case, it’s really great to have a place where I can actually access the Wav files, without guessing. Obviously, I still have an abundance of rogue folders which had already appeared, but I am deleting those as aI find them.
Update: One of the kit in the new Workspace had embedded folders. I’ll be monitoring this process going forward to see if the WAVS folder is within my expected size estimates.
Thanks, Phil. That’s exactly what’s happening here. Kits and their wav files appear in the workspace, just that their folders are usually embedded dozens of folders deep inside instruments from other kits, that are also embedded themselves.
Note: Yesterday afternoon I deleted all the content from my user_lib/wave_sources folder (after first copying it elsewhere, just in case). Everything seems to be working as it should in the BBManager. Will keep posting any news…
Additional note: Just for my benefit, to be able to create new special drumsets as necessary for my songs, I copied an organized folder full of my drumsets wavs to an external drive. If needed, I can access sounds for my instruments from there. It was a bit of a pain to create, searching via Spotlight and going to every folder deep down the embedded folders, copying each drumset folder to this new one, but now I have an alphabetically ordered list of all my wavs. It is so much easier to create new “instruments” in BBManager this way.
