Engineering1 min read
How the Finder drive works
Your library shows up in Finder like a local disk, but most of it isn’t on your Mac. A look at File Provider, on-demand downloads, and why Ableton never notices.
Theo LindqvistEngineering Lead
With Prod Crate on a Mac, your library is a location in the Finder sidebar. Every folder and file is there, with the right names, sizes, and dates. But on a 256 GB MacBook with a 1.5 TB library, most of those files can’t be on the disk. They’re placeholders.
Built on File Provider
The drive uses File Provider, the macOS framework behind iCloud Drive. Prod Crate tells macOS what’s in your library, and macOS draws it in Finder. When an app opens a file, whether it’s Ableton, Logic, or FL Studio, macOS asks Prod Crate for the contents and the app waits until they arrive.
Fast enough for a DAW
A one-shot is usually under a megabyte and arrives in well under a second on a normal connection. Longer files stream in chunks, so a DAW can start reading a stem before the end has downloaded. Files you open stay on the Mac afterwards, and the least recently used ones are cleared when space runs low.
- Pinned projects and folders always stay on the Mac, for sessions without Wi-Fi
- WAV and AIFF are stored as FLAC and converted back as they download, so your DAW sees the original
- Changes you make locally sync back in the background
Because it’s a system framework, there’s no kernel extension and nothing to approve in Privacy & Security. It’s the same approach Apple takes with iCloud Drive.