Roland-Boss Digital Recorders

[tonAP]

BR-900CD, BR-600, MICRO BR - Digital Recorders
Data Type: HiFi (MT2)

Is it a lossy or lossless compression format?
I can't find any reference.. anybody on this?

Thanks&happy2K9.

[BertKoor]

It's lossy for sure. The manual says exporting to WAV/AIFF takes a lot of time.

One uncompressed mono track @ 16bits / 44.1kHz takes 88.2 kB for one second recording time.
In HiFi (MT2) mode these things can record 16 minutes on 32GB. That means 34 kB for one second. So it compresses it into less than half the size. You can get a pretty good quality with that!

[edit]On second thought: it could be lossless! For example: 320kbps MP3 encoding does a 4:1 ratio and these do it at about 2.5:1. No idea how FLAC compares for example.
And finally: if the results sound good, then does it really matter?

[jupiter8]

In HiFi (MT2) mode these things can record 16 minutes on 32GB.

That's kinda impressive. 2 Gigs per minute roughly, huh ?



Noone likes a smartass. Except my mum. She likes me. Most of the time.

[BertKoor]

Sorry, that should be 32MB instead of GB then
But you get the picture nevertheless

[tonAP]

.. so the question remains un-answered!?

[Muzik 4 Machines]

roland just won't tell, says it's propriatery and patented(i asked my rep) but i would guess lossless if it's only a 2:1 ratio

[Gymnopedies]

I've got the BR-600. I love it, I believe it's 16/44.
The biggest downside is that it only records to 1GB cards.

[tonAP]

roland just won't tell

Yeahknow

it's propriatery and patented

Ok I can live with it:
--------------------------
Roland RDAC
WAVE form Registration Number (hex): 0x0039
Codec ID in the IANA Namespace: audio/vnd.wave;codec=39
WAVE form wFormatTag ID: WAVE_FORMAT_ROLAND_RDAC
WAVEFORMAT Name: Roland RDAC Proprietary format
--------------------------
.. and I've to say they did a good job!

but i would guess lossless if it's only a 2:1 ratio

Well, they say RDAC=lossless but then: MTP, MT1, MT2..
All those are RDAC's family.. so all lossless!? Hmmh..

[Jim Y]

Not lossless, but pretty good. MT2 is the lowest level usable if the machine requires you to bounce down to get more tracks or print FX. You can get away with at least 4 bounces in MT1.

Clever thing with R-DAC, it does not have to be decompressed to process (mix, FX). IIRC, on record, it compresses from the full wordlength from the ADC which means 18 or 20 bit depending on the machine.

Roland VS-880 and it's successors did have a lossless mode, but that isn't compressed at all, just plain 16bit pcm. Later machines added 24bit modes.

Jim

[tonAP]

Hi:

I've got the BR-600. I love it, I believe it's 16/44.
The biggest downside is that it only records to 1GB cards.

It's 16/44 for sure. But 24 bit signal processing + "AF method" for a better S/N ratio (GTR IN/onboard Mic) so i'm not worried that much about it.

The 1GB limit is a pity. FAT32 stuff i guess.

----------------

Clever thing with R-DAC, it does not have to be decompressed to process (mix, FX). IIRC, on record, it compresses from the full wordlength from the ADC which means 18 or 20 bit depending on the machine.

Jim I couldn't find anything about it (surely not on BR's; any old VS- Docs?).
Please would you mind pointing out some stuff..link(s)?

Thanks

[BertKoor]

The 1GB limit is a pity. FAT32 stuff i guess.

it uses SD cards, not?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sd_cards#C ... rger_cards
So FAT32 is not really the issue, but the 1.0 standard is.

1GB should be enough to hold all data for a couple of songs. Let's say one song is 3:30 long. Total recording capacity of 520 minutes --> 148 tracks!

[Jim Y]

Clever thing with R-DAC, it does not have to be decompressed to process (mix, FX). IIRC, on record, it compresses from the full wordlength from the ADC which means 18 or 20 bit depending on the machine.

Jim I couldn't find anything about it (surely not on BR's; any old VS- Docs?).
Please would you mind pointing out some stuff..link(s)?

Thanks[/quote]

See the last chapter of this document...
http://ps139.com/vs880ex/pages/Original880FAQs.pdf

I once carried out some quality tests on a VS-840 unit. The most notable degradation was flagged by the IMD figures (Intermodulation distortion). MT1 was fairly clean with incremental increase in IMD following track bounces. MT2 more or less quadrupled IMD for each bounce.

24bit R-dac is not something I have experienced. The early machines had 24bit internal processing (it was still very easy to clip the mix), presumably for 24bit audio, those machines have something better like 48bit internal.

A lot of good resources can be found here...
www.vsplanet.com

Jim

[tonAP]

The 1GB limit is a pity. FAT32 stuff i guess.

it uses SD cards, not?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sd_cards#C ... rger_cards
So FAT32 is not really the issue, but the 1.0 standard is.

1GB should be enough to hold all data for a couple of songs. Let's say one song is 3:30 long. Total recording capacity of 520 minutes --> 148 tracks!

http://www.geocities.com/sixtyfourguita ... Br/FAQ.htm

Q: Can I use a memory card that's larger than 1GB?

A: The BRs use the Fugue flash file system licensed from Kyoto Software Research (www.kyoto-sr.co.jp). Because this file system is based on Microsoft's FAT-16, it uses 16-bit sector addressing. That means it can address a maximum of 65,536 (2^16) disc sectors. Each sector is 16KB so the maximum bytes addressable is 65,536 * 16KB = 1,048,576KB, which is 1GB.

Although I haven't tried it, my guess is that a larger card would probably work, but you'd only be able to access 1GB of its capacity due to the 16-bit sector addressing in the BR's file system. So why bother?

A firmware update would be required to increase the 1GB limit. This could be accomplished by changing the file system to FAT-32, but that would likely mean a complete re-write of the operating system (plus a new license agreement with Kyoto Software Research) and I think it's very unlikely that Roland will ever do that for the existing models. A more feasible solution would be to modify the operating system to allow for multiple disc partitions and provide a way for the user to select the active partition. In this way, you could have a 4GB card, for example, that's divided into four 1GB partitions. It would be like having four 1GB memory cards, but you wouldn't have to physically swap them. Instead, you'd just go into the Utility menu and set the active partition to one of the four partitions on the 4GB card. I think this is something that Roland could easily do, but somehow I doubt that they will. It seems more likely that they'll eventually just introduce a new line of BR models with FAT-32. So, the current line of BRs will probably always be limited to 1GB.

[tonAP]

]See the last chapter of this document...
http://ps139.com/vs880ex/pages/Original880FAQs.pdf

Well, it's an old one and I don't know the peoples involved there..
But, since it says "original", I'll take it as the true-original-one;
so I've to admit I'm really confused:
Roland says: r-dac=lossless-compression.
NO: he's a Roland-employee, not Roland..

A lot of good resources can be found here...
www.vsplanet.com

Yeah: huge site; still browsing. Thnx!

[Dean Aka Nekro]

Im not sure about the model your asking about but i have a beaten up old BR-1600 or something like that. The Pre-amps are horrendous but fun to abuse and the AD/DA's are not to hot either but it is what it is and at the time was very useful for scratching down ideas and recording rehersals..etc

I think the one i have justs records straight .Wav files @ 16-Bit/44.1Khz as it has a hard drive built in (around 40GB IIRC) and a CD-RW drive also: squeezing more than double the amount of data on it back when i used it would of been great!

The compressed format i presume is for the models which use SD cards for storage as that would make sense and as i say mine is old, probably a first edition model compared to what they would be at like third edition or whatever now and you get way more bang for your buck these days i must say