Tracktion Software

Mr. Tingle · Post by **Mr. Tingle** » Wed Mar 23, 2005 10:44 am

Hey Matt,

I'm thinking of getting an external hardrive have you got any recommendations? What sort of performance can I expect?

(question open to anyone who may shed some light on this subject)

Tim Brackett · Post by **Tim Brackett** » Wed Mar 23, 2005 4:09 pm

Lunch Money wrote:I'd say if you're working in a professional environment in which you are able to invoice the client for a hard drive, it doesn't get much better or more reliable than that for archiving. I WOULD worry that you should keep a redundant copy somewhere, too, though, so exporting the edits and storing on DVD is still good practice as a secondary backup.

Making a redundant copy on HD is the easy part. You can select a directory to copy at the end of the day and just let it do it's thing. Burning DVDs takes some planning and then babysitting. My audio drive is in a removable drive bay. My primary drive has a 10gig partition for the OS and a 5gig partition for temporary image files for burning. The remander of the drive I use for backing up of audio files. If I have a customer drive I'll slap it in a spare drive rack and make that a third copy. That is three copies in 2 locations. After a customer project is completed they have their copy that is their responsibility to back up and store. I'll keep my copies for a short time but will wipe them out when I need the space.

Lunch Money · Post by **Lunch Money** » Wed Mar 23, 2005 5:05 pm

I guess if you give them the caveat, "This will soon be the only copy, I suggest you make a backup." then your bases are covered.

IIRs · Post by **IIRs** » Wed Mar 23, 2005 5:09 pm

If you do this type of thing a lot, maybe you should consider putting a cheap PC together just for DVD burning duties: All it would need is a removable drive bay and a DVD burner, and you could leave it backing up your last project while you start work on the next..

mmmatt · Post by **mmmatt** » Wed Mar 23, 2005 5:57 pm

Tingle wrote:Hey Matt,

I'm thinking of getting an external hardrive have you got any recommendations? What sort of performance can I expect?

(question open to anyone who may shed some light on this subject)

I just bought a maxtor from my local best buy store. It is a usb2, but you can also go with the firewire. About the same IMHO, and firewire 800 is a waste. Make sure it is a 7200 rpm drive with 8MB cache. Make sure you go into your external drives setting and adjust for highest performance. This is required to activate the cache. The only downside is you have to "stop" the drive in windows before detaching it. I would also reformat the drive as NTFS unless you are going to use it on a win98 machine. I also did seperate partitions on mine to make defragmenting easier. That way I can have 3 freshly defraged drives at my disposal and just move things around. Mine is a 200GB drive and that seems to be a real comfortable size for what I'm doing. I didn't do a ton of research other than the basic stuff I listed above. I know some people tout some different brands for different reasons, but so far I am 100% pleased with the maxtor. This info is of course for recording to the external. If I were looking just for moveable storage I would most likely buy an external usb2/firewire drive bay that I could change the drives in. That way you can upgrade or replace drives much cheaper. This is especially convienient for people who archive to HD.
As for price, I paid $200 for mine but I was impatient and wanted to get working on things right away. I usually buy my computer stuff at newegg.com They have great prices, selection, service, shipping etc... I highly recommend them.

Matt

Mr. Tingle · Post by **Mr. Tingle** » Thu Mar 24, 2005 9:21 am

Thanks for the info Matt, thats been a great help.

Mike

mmmatt · Post by **mmmatt** » Thu Mar 24, 2005 5:47 pm

Tingle wrote:Thanks for the info Matt, thats been a great help.

Mike

no problem Mike. I'm glad to help when I can!

Tim Brackett wrote: Have you read this recent thread? http://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic ... sc&start=0

When you say you have cut the tracks I am assuming you mean destructively in something other than Tracktion. If you do then you need to be aware of the problem if the tracks are not exactly a whole number of blocks long. You will get a glitch at the track marker.
Now if you split the track in Tracktion, nothing happens to the original wave file at all and no new files are created. Tracktion only edits nondestructively which means that if you trim out one song and save that edit then you have only saved a reference to the portion of the entire recording that contains that song. In fact you could drag out the ends of that clip all the way out to the full length of the original recording.
.

I meant to comment on this too. This is VERY helpful. I had no idea this could be done. I can see this as both a big time saver and also a great way to maintain file integrity... Thanks! I'm such a friggin' newbie!

Matt

robinhopkins · Post by **robinhopkins** » Fri Mar 25, 2005 5:59 pm

I began dialog w/mackie techs around the end of feb. I have powerbook 1.67 w,1gb ram 1640 onyx board - 250GB LACIE d2 extreme
My first question was Can I do this (record maximum of 150 min on 16 tracks).
The answer was on more than one call was YES!
After several calls and attempts to figure out the problem, level 2 tech said that I needed a faster( high performance hard drive. I got Glyph 200 gb and you all know now that it didn't matter.
Mackie does deserve some heat because, it is now obvious that they didn't anticipate practical use of this setup was extended length session I am more interested now in finding out which is the best product for this long recording work.
rh

Mr. Tingle · Post by **Mr. Tingle** » Fri Mar 25, 2005 7:18 pm

I reckon they will either release a T1 patch to solve this or fix it in T2.

I can't see them leaving it. I mean Mackie, a pro audio company selling a top of the range mixer with software that flakes out when doing long recording sessions. I don't think so, they would be the laughing stock of the pro audio world.

I would anticipate a very quick fix.

syncopated_silence · Post by **syncopated_silence** » Fri Mar 25, 2005 7:34 pm

i think the limit for the .wav is something like 2 gigs other than that you need to creat a separate wav file and continue on recording

syncopated_silence · Post by **syncopated_silence** » Fri Mar 25, 2005 7:38 pm

a 16 bit 44.1 kHz one that is

mmmatt · Post by **mmmatt** » Fri Mar 25, 2005 8:41 pm

rumer has it they are working on a fix to get the limit to 4GB. I was told it was going slow because 3-4hr testing sessions take so long. I got a good chuckle out of that... I've probably done 20 of them.

Matt

jens · Post by **jens** » Fri Mar 25, 2005 9:46 pm

mmmatt wrote: I was told it was going slow because 3-4hr testing sessions take so long.

some insider told me yesterday that they take 3-4hours at Mackie...

mmmatt · Post by **mmmatt** » Wed Mar 30, 2005 6:41 pm

another update from Mackie! They have produced and tested a patch that will allow up to a 4GB wav file. This means... drum roll please... we can record 4hrs, 8min of 24/96 mono in one shot!!!!!! Wuuu Hooo!!!! Score one for the squeaky wheel! The patch will automatically stop the recording at 3.99GB but will not restart it. For most of us doing concert archival recordings this should be plenty of time.
What I don't know is if this patch is for T2, or both, but at least we know that Mackie has taken this seriously, and Jules was up to the task.
Thanks to all (forum, jules, and mackie) for helping on this issue. Hopefully this patch will be available soon.

Matt

FoxV · Post by **FoxV** » Wed Mar 30, 2005 6:46 pm

cool. impressive!

Tracktion Software

KVR Audio

recording 2GB+ wav's in traction (title edited)