This just happened to us, so we thought we’d save you the anxiety attack that comes with not being able to get to your VSL library, even though you can see the sounds on your hard drive. In our case, everything started going wrong after a power outage that lasted several hours (with the outside temperature topping out at 101 degrees). Two hours plus is just too long for any battery backup system, so when the power finally came back on, we had to wait for our Mac to reboot, only to find one of our external hard drives wasn’t showing up. Despite our best efforts, it appeared the drive had suffered some sort of fatal damage. However, the two additional drives booted back up and were humming along just fine. When we get these blackouts, we like to run Apple’s Disk Utility to verify that all the remaining drives are okay.
The following day, we had a recording session planned for which we wanted to have that killer VSL library available for adding brass and string parts. But when it came time to launch the plug-in, we got a scary message saying the library could not be found. We double-checked the drive housing the 400 gigs plus of data, then ran the Directory Manager, which had no problem locating the files and confirming their location. To make a long (and nerve-wracking) story short, it turns out that the VSL system looks at the entire network of hard drives that are connected to the Mac. When it didn’t see the disk that had crashed, it basically refused to go any further. Maybe reinstalling the VSL software would help, but before going to all that hassle, we simply powered down the whole system, gave it a few minutes to catch its breath, then powered up again. This time it was not looking for the damaged hard drive, which had been removed, and so it worked flawlessly from then on. The moral of the story is that sometimes a simple step, such as powering down and then restarting fresh is all it takes to fix what appeared at first to be a disaster of epic proportions!