05-15-2011, 08:49 PM

I produce music at a home studio that is run on PC. I will be starting audio engineering school in July. The school uses only Mac computers for everything and I will be issued an external drive to save all of my files and projects etc...I am not sure yet the exact model of the drive I will be given but I do know it will be a Firewire 800 external hard drive. I want to be able to make the external I am given to be able to take projects from school to my home studio and work on them and also take my own projects from my home studio and work on them at school. How should/could I go about making the drive able to work and transfer files between the Macs at school and my PC at home? Any help will be greatly appreciated. Thank you

05-15-2011, 08:51 PM

Just make sure the drive is formatted FAT32 and you'll be fine. Both will be able to read and write to the drive.

The bigger question is to make sure the file types or apps you'll be using on each are compatible.

Oh and welcome to Mac-Forums!

05-15-2011, 08:55 PM

Thank you. Doesn't FAT32 limit the size of the drive and I also heard that it isn't very stable...I talked to someone at an Apple Store and they said something about formatting the drive HFS + Extended, does that sound right? The programs and file types would be that of Propellerhead's Reason and Avid Pro Tools which I believe should have the same file extension regardless of platform they are used on.

05-15-2011, 08:58 PM

HFS+ is the native Mac system, but won't be read/writeable by Windows. The most compatible option is FAT32. Otherwise you could try NTFS and use a third-party Mac tool like Mac Fuse to write to it:

macfuse - The Easiest and Fastest Way to Create File Systems for Mac OS X - Google Project Hosting

05-15-2011, 09:02 PM

you can read HFS + on Windows, not write. (with a program called HFSExplorer)

you can read NTFS on a Mac, not write. (you can by paying for Paragon driver)

you can read and write FAT32 on both OS'es. 4GB filesize limit I believe.

unless your doing massive, epic recordings with loads (and i mean loads) of audio files, you arent gonna hit 4GB with your Session folders.

For instance: i did a 12 track studio recording recently : 10 drum takes (80 separate audio files) 2 guitar (8 audio files) 4 vocal takes (4 audio files) bass (1 audio file)

all mono WAV 24bit 44.1kHz

the whole session file hit around 1.2GBs. a stereo mix at an uncompressed format at an average length of 3-4 mins is around 40 MB (10MB a min).

05-15-2011, 09:09 PM

Thanks for the quick responses guys you're awesome. I guess Fat32 is the way to go then. I was told I could use HFS+ Extended and use a program called MacDrive to handle reading and writing with a Mac Drive on a Windows PC but it seems Fat32 may be the easiest and most reliable solution. The main concern would only be stability I really don't want the drive corrupting or crashing. Which of the two options would be the safest bet?

05-15-2011, 09:17 PM

I dont recommend MacDrive - it is unsupported in Windows 7 last time I checked. And there are alot of unhappy customers who found the software unreliable and unusable.

FAT32 will be perfect - remember that file size limit is only for a single file: and as an audio student (as I am) I assure you, nothing you will come across in audio production will ever exceed around 1GB, unless you do a long DJ mixes uncompressed or something.

05-15-2011, 09:23 PM

Once again thank you so much for all your help guys you really made this easy.