Workflow1 min read
Touring with 2 TB on a laptop
SOLACE plays 90 shows a year with a MacBook, a controller, and no external drives. How a touring DJ keeps a 2 TB library ready offline, and what gets pinned before every flight.
Maya OkaforCo-founder & CEO
SOLACE used to tour with three external drives in a padded case: one for the library, one mirroring it, and one for stems and edits made on the road. Two of them failed in the same year. This year, the case stayed home.
What lives on the laptop
The full library is 2 TB of tracks, edits, stems, and one-shots, on a MacBook with 1 TB of storage. All of it is in Prod Crate, but only what the next few shows need is pinned, which keeps about 300 GB on the machine at any time.
- The next three sets, pinned the night before each travel day
- A folder of edits and IDs that stays pinned for the whole tour
- Stems for live remixes, pinned show by show
Working without Wi-Fi
Hotel and venue Wi-Fi is unreliable enough that SOLACE plans as if it doesn’t exist. Pinned files are real files on the disk, so rekordbox and Ableton read them with no connection at all. Edits made on a flight sync once the laptop finds a network, and version history keeps the originals.
“The rule is simple: if I’m playing it this week, it’s pinned. Everything else can live in the cloud.”
Unpinning a finished set frees the space immediately, and it’s still one click away when a promoter asks for something from last season.