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Catastrophic fail with BR and Yamaha..


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The thing about the Yamaha, is that it has lots and lots of tracks.  I feed TC straight off the 744t into track 14.  There was never crosstalk as far as I could tell.. and I brought the gain down as low as it can go, and BR never 'lost' the TC signal read.

 

However, the TC got lost, once the system started failing with distortion. 

 

I've had many many hours logged into my BR, and it's never been a problem as far as I know.  However, I've had 4 mixers in that time, and I suspect the 01v96, but who knows..  This is a problem that comes up, very rare.

 

I decided to abandon the USB set up.  And, in fact, now I'm going the Daunte route.  I've ran some test with BR, Dante V Sound, and it seams to work great.  I might use BR as a back up to a Pix260 now or in the future.

 

-Richard

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it is either a WC problem or a Core audio issue.  It almost sounds like your core audio buffer is too small and you are losing samples.

 

If you un-enable tracks, does the problem go away with less data being pushed?  If so, increase the buffer in core audio.

 

 

im almost 90% sure this is a core audio issue.

 

No. I can limit it down to one track, and the problem is still there.

 

However, you bring up a good point.  One of the problems with using a computer as your recorder, is that NO computer ever stays the same.  Software gets installed, software gets removed, drives update, software updates, and hard drives write and read.  This results in data being pushed around, all the time, in which things change on that computer, even though you don't want anything to change..

 

The only way to make things NOT change, is to have an image file, and/or wipe the Hard Drive or simply boot off a image file each time you work on location.  This would work, but it also makes upgrades nearly impossible, for that same reason of not making any changes.

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BR 7.25.3

Thank you for the information.

The newest version of Boom Recorder has a slightly different IOCycle so I was worried that it may have been the cause.

But 7.25.3 has an IOCycle that has done its job for many years.

 

What I found interesting was the audio sounded like it was mixing audio from slightly earlier, just a few miliseconds. A sort of reverb was clearly audible. It is like somehow audio buffers where partially cleared and partly reused and mixed-in with new audio.

Make sure you have downloaded the latest CoreAudio drivers for your audio interface, and you may want to contact Yamaha if they have heard about this issue before.

 

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I've had many many hours logged into my BR, and it's never been a problem as far as I know.  However, I've had 4 mixers in that time, and I suspect the 01v96, but who knows..  This is a problem that comes up, very rare.

 

 

Four mixers? Gaaaaaaa... you mean had to go through four different 01v96's? That's awful! There's gotta be something else going on here.

 

I'm with Take: I wonder if the audio drivers were corrupted in some way. I did have some really messy setup problems initially with the Yamaha 01V I used with my Metacorder laptop about 5-6 years ago (which Dave Fisk may dimly remember he helped me out with back at Coffey). 

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But two of the Yamaha 01Vs have failed? That's suspicious. I wonder if there's something else going on.

 

We had 14 of the Yamaha 03D's at Complete Post throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, and only one of them failed throughout that entire time. Turned out to be a flakey power supply. We cannibalized that one and used it for parts for all the other ones (mostly pots) over the years.

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  • 2 weeks later...

The key to me is to make zero changes in set up to either the computers or the mixing consoles. The recall ability of the 01V96 helps a lot, but I have seen cases where in a "power bump" situation, the mixer came up with bogus numbers in some of the presets, which led to digital clicks and instabilities. Some of the numbers were "illegal," even having garbled letters and symbols in a setting that expects to see decibel numbers. 

 

I still suspect some kind of word clock/reference issue. What happens if everything was taken off an external reference like a Denecke SB-T or something?

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  • 1 month later...
  • 4 months later...

Hi Richard, I've worked on a project that also used Yamaha digital board, going to MOTU interface and to BR and we've also experienced this issue.

 

The workaround we did was to set BR to pre-roll by 6 seconds, and every 40 minutes we would manually cut the audio files and record a new track (you have 6 seconds to do this according to the pre-roll). Just stitch back the audio files. 

 

We did not have any digital distortion again after the work around. 

 

I would recommend this in case anyone is going to use BR for a long recording session with multiple tracks. 

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Fauzan,

 

Do you mean you just stop and start a new recording Boom Recorder and that fixes the issue. That is really odd, because nothing changes with the communication between Boom Recorder and the audio interface when stopping or starting a recording. Boom Recorder is capturing audio at all times, whetter recording or not, this is how pre-roll works.

 

I am really confused right now, this information has to sink in before I comment on this further.

 

Cheers,

    Take

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Hi Take,

 

Yes. We actually stopped recording and start a new one every 40 minutes. The pre-roll is to save us from the missing few seconds in between stopping and recording a new take. Yes, Boom Recorder is capturing audio at all times due to the pre roll but it will then starts writing to a new file.

 

Hope it clears things up a bit.

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Sadly it doesn't solve my confusion. It sound like Boom Recorder would somehow put corrupt audio data into an audio file after a while.

 

The code for doing this hasn't changed for many many years, and I have customers who record continues for months for wildlife, and for days on reality shows.

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Sorry! 

 

Unfortunately this was last year and I have since forgotten the actual version number and other details that might help you troubleshoot this issue.

 

What I remember is that we certainly had a master timecode generator feeding all devices and the master word clock was coming from the Yamaha digital board. We also recorded an audio analog version of the timecode to one track on the Boom Recorder.

 

We recorded 24 tracks in total (and I think BR split this to 3 BWF files - 8 tracks each). If I'm not mistaken BR will automatically generate a new file once the 4GB memory limit is exceeded. We used this setting on the first day. 

We found out that digital distortion are evident in the later files of the first day.

(We started recording from 10pm the night before, at 10am on the first day - there's a lot of distortion that it's pretty much unusable)

 

I am not saying this is a fault with BR, there might be a drift in a clock somewhere in our setup or there might be a file buffer issue with our hard disk. What I am saying is that our work-around (manually stopping and recording to a new take) solves the problem and we didn't have distortion again for the rest of the 6 weeks (this was reality TV).

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I would not really recommend having the Yamaha be the master clock--it isn't very accurate.  An external clock from a (much) more stable clock generator (many to choose from) for all the devices would be less problematic re sync drift.  I recorded many long shows (3+ hrs on a single run) with BR on as many as 24 tracks without distortion issues.

 

philp

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  • 3 weeks later...

Shot in the dark here, but what's the health of the drive you are writing to? Run disk utility first aid, any SMART errors? 

 

Sadly, I never came back to this issue.. I ran out of time because I had several things going on at the time, and I was already looking into a hardware embedded solution anyway. The general consensus was the core audio buffer, but the thought that perhaps is was 'the hard drive' did cross my mind on one of the checks.  Lets face it, it's a laptop drive, running at slower speeds of 5400rpm, and the very nature of hard drives is to keep changing.  Unlike embedded hardware, things can change on a laptop, and without your knowledge sometimes.

 

I did however, go the Dante route on my mixer/recorder, and when I had some more down time, I hooked the labtop back up, and routed the tracks to the laptop via the Dante interface using Boom Recorder.  Worked like a champ for 8 hours of off and on testing.

 

I also installed a mini mac into my cart (Dante/Boom Recorder), and it's now my back up recorder #3 on my cart.  Personally I think the Dante interface is much better over the USB2 also.

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