I have My DAW installed on 2 PC’s . I have an external Drive where Absolute content is installed. On one PC, every thing works fine. on the other I get the message, the mediabay server cannot be reached. Everything looks correct in the library manager so I have no idea what is going on. I have reinstalled the mediabay, but that made no difference
Hi, and welcome to the forum!
can you tell us which DAW (product)?
How is that external drive attached? (USB, network etc.)
What file format does the external drive use? (FAT32, NTFS, exFAT etc.)
Its an ssd connected by USB4. it’s NTFS format. problem with both reaper and Bitwig. I have omnisphere on the same drive and that works fine. It’s the mediabay that is the problem. Both PC’s are identical
Would I be right in guessing that the PC it works on, is the PC the drive was connected to when you installed Absolute content? If so, it is most likely a file permissions issue.
that’s right. is that easy to fix?
First off, to be clear, it is not an issue with Media Bay, which is in fact working on the hardware it was installed on. The issue is most likely that the Media Bay service on the second PC (rightly) does not have permission to access the files that were written by the (separate) Media Bay service on the first PC. Think of them a bit like separate user logins.
There are several options, but it depends on whether you have anything else on the drive or not. If you do not have anything else on the drive, and you don’t mind un- and re-installing everything, the easiest by far would be to format the drive as exFAT. That format has no file permissions and therefore both PCs would be able to access the content.
If you do have other things on the drive, or if you don’t want to have to un- and re-install everything, the you could try changing the permissions on the content folder and all its contents to include “Everyone” and give it full control. I don’t know if that will work though.
That’s a Windows thing and maybe beyond this forum, but it would look something like this:
Hope this helps!
Thanks for that useful stuff. One more question. Would it do to move my content to another folder, reformat and then move it back. Or would I have to reinstall again - through downloading?
Thanks for your help
Michael
Reformatting a drive partition destroys all data on that partition. You can only format an entire partition, not an individual folder. I’m assuming your external drive has only a single partition, formatted as NTFS.
If you have the space temporarily available on a different drive, you could copy the content folder out there, then (assuming the external drive has nothing else on it) reformat the external drive as exFAT, and copy the contents folder back.
Yes, that is what I meant. I have formatted many drives before. Thanks for your help MrSoundman. You’re a star