access to external storage
Hi,
I could not run webdav or Icloud (both is a nightmare on windows 10) pretty well. On the other hand after a decade of waiting IOS is now able to connect directly to an external storage device like a sd card (via USB-C adapter or hub). Actually I've been saving all my samples there (for using the poylend tracker). It would be so easy, just changing the default sample path to an external storage. Are there any plans to implement that? By the way webdav drives me crazy because of some memory exeedings (of course I change the minfilesize but it's still not working and creates 0 byte files anyway). The whole process accessing data on IOS is just crazy ......
Comments
You can always mount the windows machine as an SMB share in the Files.app and share files that way.
Once the share is mounted it's accessible to all apps that can use the standard iOS document picker.
I'm very skeptical of these suggestions to keep data on external storage by default. What happens if the user picks up the iPad and opens Drambo? It tries to load the last project, but the external storage is not connected. What does it do? Fail to load the project with "unknown error"? Issue a prompt to connect the external drive and lock up until the drive is available? There's no good solution to this. Requiring an external drive contradicts the concept of a mobile device.
@tbo1 Yes it's a nightmare if you don't use the right Windows apps.
I'm using Total Commander from ghisler.com and the free "WebDAV 3.2" plugin from https://www.ghisler.com/plugins.htm.
Works like it should here 😊
The good thing with WebDAV is that it is completely independent from Apple's weird idea of file management because Drambo provides the WebDAV server for its own part of the file system.
Thanks a lot for the helpfull comments. I tried the smb approach with FE File Explorer Pro which works very well. On the other hand, it would be helpfull IMHO if sound browsing with an external drive would be possible inside drambo. I would except the need for importing the samples avoiding the missing sample problem.
Just a couple of results by trying different ways to transfer data between Windows and Drambo
WebDAV:
embedded Windows client (failed, slow, unreliable)
Total Commander:
1. it works
2. TC costs 46 Euros
3. the GUI of TC is special (no judgement), it needs (a lot of) time to understand it
So I tried WINSCP instead but with the same results as the native Windows WebDAV
iCloud:
Windows client:
no synchronizing, failures
Browser:
not reliable, synchronize errors
SMB:
using SMB inside of FE File Explorer Pro:
I bookmarked the share on windows with Drambo files, moving the files to the iCloud (inside the folder of FE File Explorer)
Using the apple file app to move the files to the local app folder of Drambo (by ignoring the synchronize messages of iCloud. If the files/folders are saved in the Drambo folder, they are switching from grey to white.
Performance results:
WebDAV: around 150KB/S
SMB: around 5-10 MB/S
I copied my whole Maschine (NI) library and different sound packs (extensions) to drambo: 60GB with 100.000 files (compressed with m4a: 5GB) in 1h.
Conclusion: Why WebDAV? It's slow and unreliable. IMHO SFTP would be a much better choice (widely used, reliable, hundreds of clients for all systems). WebDAV may seem to be simple but the opposite is the case if you want to copy more than a few files (in this case, using the iCloud would be fine).
@tbo1 If you're using FE File Explorer, you can bring the local Drambo folder directly in to FE, as an External Location (little green drive icon). In the pic, I selected the local Drambo folder, then renamed it from "Documents" to "Drambo". You can then copy that content to or from anywhere else that FE can see, zip/unzip it, etc. Notice that I still have the WebDAV link to Drambo, but that's no longer needed. The only catch is that these links are invalidated by a Drambo update; apparently there's a generated name in the path that is changed on an update. But it's easy to re-create the link when it is broken.
Another thing that works perfectly well and fast when working with files on the same device is Readdle Documents for accessing Drambo WevDAV. It also has a lot of other connectivity built in.