Running from a USB stick

Take VSE2 between studios, leaving nothing behind

VSE2 can run in portable mode, where it keeps everything it needs — your settings, your licence, the logs and the day-part templates — in its own folder, and writes nothing at all to the computer it is running on.

That makes it useful if you:

move between studios, or between home and the station;
work on a machine you would rather not install software on;
use a locked-down PC where you cannot install anything anyway.

Setting it up

1 Get the program files onto the stick

If you have already installed VSE2, copy its installed folder to the stick — the whole folder, not just the program. To find it, right-click the Visual Segue Editor shortcut and choose Open file location.

If you would rather not install it at all, you can take the files straight out of the download:

Unzip the file you downloaded. Inside you will find setup.exe and another zip called VisualSegueEditorv2.zip.
Ignore setup.exe — that is the installer, and you do not need it.
Unzip VisualSegueEditorv2.zip onto your stick instead. Those are the program files.

Either way you should end up with a folder on the stick containing VisualSegueEditorv2.exe and a good number of other files alongside it.

Keep everything together. VSE2 needs the files that sit next to it, so copying the .exe on its own will not work.

2 Create the marker file

In that folder on the stick — the one containing VisualSegueEditorv2.exe — create an empty text file called portable.txt.

Right-click in the folder, choose New → Text Document, and name it portable.txt. You do not need to put anything in it.

3 Run it from the stick

That is it. Start VSE2 from the stick as normal, and it will keep its settings and licence there beside itself.

Watch the file name. Windows hides file extensions by default, so a file you think you named portable.txt can really be called portable.txt.txt — and VSE2 will not see it.

If portable mode does not seem to be working, turn on File name extensions in File Explorer's View menu and check the name.

Your licence

The licence lives on the stick too, so you register once and it works on every computer you plug it into. It counts as a single installation, not one per machine.

That is the real advantage of portable mode for anyone working across several studios: one licence, one registration, and it follows you around.

Turning it off again

Delete portable.txt. VSE2 goes back to being a normal installation, keeping its settings on the computer it is installed on.

Why a file, and not a setting? Because the marker is a property of where the program is, not of how you happened to start it. A shortcut option would only apply when someone remembered to use it, and VSE2 would quietly save to the host PC the one time they forgot.

What gets kept on the stick

Your settings	`Settings.ini`
Your licence	`licence.lic`
Day-part templates	`dptemplate.db`
Log files	for support, if something goes wrong

All of it in the VSE2 folder, and nothing anywhere else.