When My 400 GB Library Became “Legacy” Overnight

Years ago, I bought an expensive sample library. For me, at that time, it was a big purchase, not just money wise, but also in terms of storage. The library was around 400 GB, so I even bought a new hard drive just to be able to install it and keep it ready all the time.

Once I set it up, it worked like a charm. The sound was great, the player was stable, and it quickly became one of my go to libraries. You know that feeling when a library becomes part of your musical identity? That was it for me. I felt like “Okay, this was totally worth the investment.”

Then, a few years later, the company decided to upgrade their sample player and move on to a brand new product, basically a “Strings Version 2” kind of situation. New engine, new interface, shiny new features… And slowly, my original library started to feel like an afterthought, old player in town :).

At first, it was small stuff: fewer updates, no real improvements, some compatibility quirks. Then newer OS and DAW updates came along, and the cracks started to show. The old player wasn’t really being maintained anymore(vst2), and suddenly this huge 400 GB library I had invested in started to feel like a “legacy product” rather than something truly supported.

That’s the part that hurts a bit as a composer. I didn’t buy a subscription; I bought a tool I expected to rely on for many years. I don’t expect free new products forever, but I also don’t expect my existing purchase to slowly die because all attention moved to the next version.

This experience made me think about a few things:

How much we depend on proprietary players and ecosystems
How important it is to keep old installers and working setups
And how “lifetime access” often doesn’t mean “lifetime compatibility”

These days, when I buy a big library, I try to be more careful. I save installers, I bounce important parts to audio, and sometimes I even keep an older OS setup alive just for legacy stuff. It’s not ideal, but it’s better than losing a sound that became part of my musical voice.

I’m curious:Has this ever happened to you?Did you ever invest in a library that later became almost unusable because of player changes or version 2 releases? How do you protect yourself from this kind of thing?

To be honest I love companies like Xfer , they made "Serum 2" and make it available for old users too. So I switched to Serum too with my existing sounds from pastand with no extra cost. Sorry for long read but I wanted to share this with every composer here. :)

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