Marty, I leave everything on the external hard drive and run it all from there - program and tracks. I don't load anything from my computer. It works just fine. The exception is the DAW plug-in, but, as I said before, I find that pretty useless with my DAW (Mixcraft). I do everything I want in BIAB and then export the .wav files to Mixcraft, where I add the vocals and anything else.