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[testtone]

HI,

Computer question here: If I get a combo USB/Firewire External Hard Drive would i be able to transfer WAV files from my Mac to my PC? I am not looking to transfer session data, just the raw audio files. I am just thinking that I would probably have to format the drive for MAC OS or PC (Fat 32 or similar) and i don't know if the drive would be recognized if I plug it into the machine that it is not formatted for. Does anyone know about this, or, if this dosen't work - the best way to transfer large files like this between platforms? I've been using an FTP server currently, and even with a T1 line it still takes a long time. Thanks!

[mikedaul]

Are you primarily a mac or a pc user? Are you using osX? In my experience you can mount a pc-formatted drive in osX with *no* problems at all. Going the other way (mac drive on a pc) might cause some headaches (I've really only had these types of problems with fonts, all those damn hidden mac files...), but I would wager that it will work just fine, especially for just raw audio data.

[testtone]

i am primarily a Mac user, but have 2 PC's i use for mastering @ work. I tried using the drive formatted for Mac on my PC this morning, and it recognizes that there is a drive there, but does not show it in the "my computer" view. I am currently running OS X Panther on my Mac and Windows 2000 Pro on my PC's. Perhaps i will try to reformat the drive on the PC side and see if it mounts in Mac land...

[floodstage]

Why not drop your wav files onto a CD-RW when you want to move them?  Both platforms shold be able to deal with that.

[Rail Jon Rogut]

I highly recommend MacDrive5 from MediaFour -- if you have sd2 files which you need to convert to WAV (or BWF) check out my free sdTwoWav app at www.railjonrogut.com

Rail

[Jonas as]

Hi,
I do it every day,
i use a PC-formatted fat-32 firewire/usb 2 that i simply unplug from the stationary
work-PC and into my powerbook, it's instantly recognized, and the days finished mixes, edit-candidates is just a drag and drop (copy/paste depending on your personal preferences) away from my personal archive.

Apart from the copying itself, the whole process takes about 4 seconds, thats including waking up the powerbook from sleep mode.    

It's better than a long CD burning process, 600-700megs aren't very much if talking
multitrack anyway.

PC's don't like mac formatted HD's much, and why should they? It's not like Macs are that keen on working with NTFS drives either.

[testtone]

Great, i'll try re-formatting to FAT-32 then - i agree, i tired of burning CD-R's (or a stack of them at a time) awhile ago, so if i can get this cookin' that'll be wonderful! Thanks.

[testtone]

So i started to format the drive to FAT-32, and i come to find out that in Windows 2000 it can only format up to 32GB at a time, with my 200 GB drive that would be 7 partitions, which i don't even think is possible to do. Also, i can only transfer 4GB at a time with the FAT-32 protocol. Western Digital reccomends formatting to NTFS, however, the MAC dosen't like/see that. If i format in MAC land, then the PC can't see the drive. When i am transferring an entire projects audio files, that can be 10GB + sometimes, so the 4GB limit of FAT-32 is really a bummer. Could i format in MAC OS and buy something like MAC Opener for the PC? Any ideas? Thanks.

[Erik]

Format it as FAT32 using the disk utility in Mac OS X and/or a format utility from your drive vendor.  That will get rid of the partition limit size.

Max file size on FAT32 is 2GB per file.  

--Erik

[Invisible Member]

Ive been using something called Transmac. I can transfer Mac files onto a PC or back. No Problems.


Peace,
Dennis

[iluvatar]

Erik wrote on Fri, 04 June 2004 16:53

Format it as FAT32 using the disk utility in Mac OS X and/or a format utility from your drive vendor.  That will get rid of the partition limit size. --Erik

Exactly. Windows 2000 can't partition drives over 32GB, but it can read larger ones.

-Dan.