Found out about the surprising collection of rare and antique orchestral instruments from VSL but some of the libraries are so big for only like one thing I want to hear, could I take parts out of a library I don’t need or does it need all the pieces to work? For example, I only need the bass sax from Studio Saxophones but I don’t know if they just group the sample “volumes” by instrument type or microphone position, if I could remove unnecessary microphones and use the dry samples I could work with that.

thank goodness stuff like ophicleide, crumhorn, serpent, etc. are only up to a few gigabytes at most so I don’t have to worry about them shortening the time till I need another ssd…

 

In this case yes they are grouped per instrument and you can delete or even don't download what you dont want. With synchrone stage libs they are grouped per mic and you can also delete mic, but studio has only 1 mic (sometimes 2?)

 

Instead of deleting, you can always move the files to a new folder and check if everything still works. If it's not, bring back the files to their original location.

 

It's kind of surprising how few people think to do this with stuff. Even with how many plugins some people have, you can do the same thing in batches to narrow down that giant number of suspects very quickly.