move Logic content to external drive using Symbolic Link

After going through the Symbolic link process tick the Menu Bar and –> Download All Available Content. Several screens may appear and Skip All to have other content be downloaded. Eventually all Logic Pro X content will be downloaded to your external hard drive.

Figure it out if there are glitches. This procedure is doable.

Thank you very much, The Art of Sound, for this post.

Hello there.. I tried to follow your instructions to the letter and I still have issues. I'm trying to move the folders to a 4 tb SD HD and the folders are there but no links. I don't know where to go from there, can you please help me?

Hi EcoGreg, I'm thinking to pursuse an very fast SD to save my Logic Pro x library. The SD has speed 270mb/s . Do you believe is this good speed to read my ribrary without issues? Do your SD has this speed or slower?

I am having a problem with Logic Pro. I moved all the Logic, Apple Loop and Garage Band files to the external using SymLink. Everything moved fine, by when I go into About and look at my system my Music Creation still has 10 gigs being used and when I examine it, it says it’s Instrument Library. When I go back to Library/Application Support I only have the Linked Logic File. So where is this Instrument Library file hiding.

To find any files on your computer or hard drives I suggest reading this article to familiarize yourself with what's available. Not to come across as cute; I was taken aback years ago when I first came across and realized such software existed for a novice at computers like meself 😎 Made me want to think of my own cool, novel software someday; make a million dollars, 'ya know?

http://osxdaily.com/2016/04/29/best-disk-storage-analyzers-mac/

I want to tip my hat and commend the engineers involved with Logic Pro X. I don't believe anyone has an unkind word or thought towards these guys in regards to their involvement through the years to cause LPX to be what it is today: a quality piece of software. Were they to somehow realize these type of little guy situations? and resolve this one stupid task of symbolic links to enable the large file folders to be placed on an external hard drive by enabling a software trick to do the same, I'd be appreciative, to say the least.

Just one more thing: I personally find it difficult to re-transform the thoughts and emotions I have at any given moment into a ditty with LPX. Fiddle this, tweak that, adjuxt this over here, and what I conjured and thought cool a moment ago is gone, or dissolved into something else. Can't get it back now. And it happens all the time. With a guitar or a piano, I could see myself playing around and fine tuning the chord or the notes, and I realize what I'm doing with the frets or the black and white keys; intuitively I play along and maybe something comes up. Maybe not, but with LPX there is nothing similar to frets on the guitar or those symbolic black and white keys on the keyboard to suggest intuitively how or what or where to fiddle to achieve or create the sense I'm attempting to create with sound. It's like I'm working with zero's and one's in assembly language with LPX when composing and there needs to be one more layer to strip that LPX mechanistic space away. The last part of the movie, Amadeus, Mozart in bed pulling the thoughts from mind to actual notes as easy as snapping his fingers. Logic Pro X would do well with an interface that could do the same.

I gotta go do something else now … .

When on You Tube once, a guy was showing you how to could get the latest upgrade of Logic Pro onto his Mavericks OS without upgrading the system (Apple wants yo to upgrade the whole OS).

But he didn't want to upgrade to the later version of the OS (whatever it was back then); he thought Mavericks was more stable.

He got himself an external hard-drive and after downloading the OS upgrade, he upgraded the system BUT he upgraded the external hard drive instead of his HD. The Wizard ad asked him which physical drive should be upgraded.

After the upgrade was complete the Wizard then asked him if he wanted to migrate any programs over to the new OS so of course he had Logic (and just about everything else I think) leaving his Mavericks-HD relatively empty.

I have yet to try this myself but I am now thinking upon the same lines as you.

The HD on my SSD is 1TB which back in the day sounded great news but not so these days.

I now have an external HD and I will be trying this in the near future. But it would be great to hear if anyone else has done this.

I noticed that the new iMac Pro can be configured up to 4GB of SSD but that's a future purchase. I need something for now.

This does work, but be careful if you cut/paste the command lines. The quotes are not all correct. The format should be :

sudo ln -s "/Volumes/Data/Library/Application Support/Logic" "/Library/Application Support/Logic"

With normal quotes not backquotes....

Interesting wha you say here.

Forgive this Q but at am a total newbie when it comes to Terminal:

Your code: does it make any allusions as to where the files have been moved to (such as an external drive)?

If so, where in the command line?

Look at the post from @artofsound on page one - that explains how the symbolic link works. I was just pointing out that you shouldn't cut and paste the command - if you do you'll have a symlink in your home directory that doesn't work!

But essentially the first reference is where the files are now located, and the second is where they should be for Garageband (or Logic, or whatever)

eg sudo ln -s "I/ve/moved/the/files/here" "/This/is/where/the/program/expects/them"

Very poor that Apple own Sample library can not be stored on external drive off of the OS drive.

May be because Apple want everyone's Hard Drive to fill up!? Helps with follow-on new hardware & peripheral purchases.

1) Apple isn't here....

Why doesn't Apple answer the questions that we ask about Logic Pro?

2) Symlinks and Logic Pro....

Make sure you have a full working backup of your system drive before doing anything, so if you go wrong you can quickly and easily roll back and restore from that backup...

Thanks to Fernand....

I had trouble with the symlinker app. It's much better to create symbolic links from the command line. A symbolic Link is like an "alias" or a "shortcut" except that it works at a deeper level in the OS, so it totally fools applications into thinking it's a folder.

There are GarageBand and Logic folders in /Library/Application Support on your boot drive that you will want be redirected to your desired target drive. You do this by creating symbolic links that redirect any read or write by apps to more spacious locations on what we'll call your target drive. Logic will thus go to your target drive to use loops etc, and when it downloads loops etc from Apple it will store them there. A symbolic link can make your target drive look like part of your boot drive.

In my case I have a big spacious drive called BIG where I have a top level folder called /Library, where I've built an Application Support folder into which I've copied the Logic and the GarageBand folders from the boot drive's /Library/Application Support folder. So let's look at how we make this location on BIG replace the one on the overly crowded boot drive.

Start by finding these folders in /Library/Application Support on your boot drive.

After copying them to your target drive, rename the original folders on the boot drive to GarageBand.NOT and Logic.NOT. This is temporary. That way if something goes wrong you can delete any symlinks and name the folder back by removing the .NOT at the end of the name, and it will be like before. Ok so far? Later we'll delete these extras.

Then the symlinks will be built on the boot drive using these two command lines (you will be asked your password). Note that the syntax lists the "target" of the symlink followed by its location, i.e. the "source".

sudo ln -s "/Volumes/BIG/Library/Application Support/Logic” “/Library/Application Support/Logic"

sudo ln -s "/Volumes/BIG/Library/Application Support/GarageBand” “/Library/Application Support/GarageBand"

In /Library/Application Support you will now see the 2 symlinks. They look like folders with a little arrow, and if you navigate through them with the finder you will land in the content on the BIG drive.

So far so good? In /Library/Audio you will find an Apple Loops folder. Make an Apple Loops folder in your target drive's /Library/Audio folder and copy the Apple Loops folder there. Then repeat the symlinking by using the following command:

sudo ln -s "/Volumes/BIG/Library/Audio/Apple Loops” “/Library/Audio/Apple Loops”

If you are tight on space, and why else would you do this, delete the original folders on the boot drive after backing them up and checking that everything works.

Once you set up the symbolic links, additional downloads will go to the target drive automatically. You can pick when to set up the symlinks, and when to delete the files off the boot drive.