Lost seconds in recording

[Silas]

Hi All,

Had a SCARY session the other day. I was recording 12 tracks at 24.96 . At some point I noticed that the time counter on the transport froze. About 10 seconds later it restarted where it had left off. I checked the "take" and sure enough the 10-15 seconds it was frozen was MISSING from the take. The entire time PMX passed audio without the slightest glitch to the monitoring system during the freezes ! Sometimes there would be a new clip where it had stopped and restarted but most times it still was one continuous clip but with a click at the freeze point - no blank space. This was absolutely terrifying because during a session my nose is in the score and I rarely check the transport for more than a second or two to confirm record is engaged. Therefor I could - and DID- miss a number of times that this happened before I got lucky and caught it. Fortunately I still have everything I need to edit the piece...

Has anyone experienced this? I was surprised to not get any playback stalls or Host PCI response errors, or any message of any kind...not even a click in the monitoring (I was using headphones). I'm assuming that 12 tracks of 24.96 was just maxing out this single card system (v4.3) or perhaps the Magma PCI extension bottleneck...We've done so many records this way without a hitch but not this many tracks at 96k.

Any ideas? Good thing I always bring a change of pants to sessions ...

-Silas

[tim]

Silas,

This is indeed scary. You mention "freezes" (plural)...how many times? I have recorded tons of 12-track stuff at 2FS - on a single card system - with no such problem.

However, this sort of thing is why I now routinely use a second (completely redundant) workstation on remote sessions.

Best wishes,

Tim

[Graemme]

Hi Silas & Tim,

I've seen exactly the same thing, when using 4.3 with a Magma CB2 and a single MB3 board.

I used to be able to get 8 channels of DSD (and x-fades) using this same setup (plus one additional MB3 board for SDIF) in version 4.1and maybe 4.2 as well-I don't remember anymore - but definitely not in V4.3.

When I noticed the same 'lost time' problem, I was only recording 8 channels of 44k1/24bit as a backup to my main DSD system.

I haven't seen this on any of the standard (non-Magma) systems that I use

I'm still trying to figure out what's going on - no answers yet

Best,

Graemme

Hi All,

Had a SCARY session the other day. I was recording 12 tracks at 24.96 . At some point I noticed that the time counter on the transport froze. About 10 seconds later it restarted where it had left off. I checked the "take" and sure enough the 10-15 seconds it was frozen was MISSING from the take. The entire time PMX passed audio without the slightest glitch to the monitoring system during the freezes ! Sometimes there would be a new clip where it had stopped and restarted but most times it still was one continuous clip but with a click at the freeze point - no blank space. This was absolutely terrifying because during a session my nose is in the score and I rarely check the transport for more than a second or two to confirm record is engaged. Therefor I could - and DID- miss a number of times that this happened before I got lucky and caught it. Fortunately I still have everything I need to edit the piece...

Has anyone experienced this? I was surprised to not get any playback stalls or Host PCI response errors, or any message of any kind...not even a click in the monitoring (I was using headphones). I'm assuming that 12 tracks of 24.96 was just maxing out this single card system (v4.3) or perhaps the Magma PCI extension bottleneck...We've done so many records this way without a hitch but not this many tracks at 96k.

Any ideas? Good thing I always bring a change of pants to sessions ...

-Silas

[Jakob Händel]

[quote="Silas"]Has anyone experienced this? I was surprised to not get any playback stalls or Host PCI response errors, or any message of any kind...not even a click in the monitoring (I was using headphones). I'm assuming that 12 tracks of 24.96 was just maxing out this single card system (v4.3) or perhaps the Magma PCI extension bottleneck...We've done so many records this way without a hitch but not this many tracks at 96k.

Hi Silas,

due to the fact that I experienced exactly the same problems while recording, I returned to 4.1b13 which works 100% reliably with my Toshiba Satellite connected to a Magma extension with a MADI board. I did some large tracknumber with high sampling rate testing and found ot that the following facts affected the dropouts, too:
1. I remember having more dropouts when there were many takes loaded visibly in the window.
2. Seagate drives connected externally with firewire did a lot more dropouts than e.g. Maxtor drives.
3. When the drives were "freshly" formatted there were less dropouts, too.
4. Always reboot your system after having transferred large amounts of data onto a backup drive. My system sometimes got slower and "sticky" when I started recording after a file transfer.

As I am not using the notebook-magma system for mixing, editing or mastering, I am fine with the "old" beta software as a "recording-only" solution. The system works perfectly - therefore, I don't use a second system for backup purposes.

Hope that helps and good luck,
Jakob

[Silas]

Thank you all!
Tim, it happened maybe 10-15 times in a 3 hour session(!).
Graemme, I remember seeing you do 8 tracks of DSD on a magma and being impressed that it could handle it. There must be a huge bottleneck if you now have the problem doing 8 tracks of 24.44.1!! That is scary indeed.
Thanks Jakob for the insights. Sounds like its time to roll back to 4.1 on the laptop...ouch.

I guess we had gotten complacent after doing so many records and never having a problem. I was just running a stereo backup....never again.

Many thanks,
Silas

[Silas]

Hi again,

It seems to me that all was well in v.4.2 on our system (we have edited a 16 track 44.1 recording from v4.2 on the laptop). Jakob, did you go back to 4.1 because 4.2 wasn't cutting it or just for extra safety?

Thanks,
Silas

[Jakob Händel]

Hi again,

It seems to me that all was well in v.4.2 on our system (we have edited a 16 track 44.1 recording from v4.2 on the laptop). Jakob, did you go back to 4.1 because 4.2 wasn't cutting it or just for extra safety?

Thanks,
Silas

Hi Silas,

I mainly went back to 4.1 as I recognized that the system was getting sticky during recording sessions with 4.2 when exceeding a large number (300 to 400) of multitrack takes in a project. Confirming the takes when recording became longer and longer (and made me nervous! ) I never experienced this with 4.1b13 . This may have had other reasons at that time but now I'm not touching the reliably running system...

Hope it helps,
Jakob

[benoit]

hi all,

i've been experiencing this (or a very similar) problem in 4.3.3. on magma and non-magma systems.

i remember having been tracking this problem for weeks some months ago; bertrand wrote an new VS3core-out dll, i nearly never had this problem afterwards.

but i moved to version 5 right after that, so no idea how things are in the last 4.3.3.

question: are you loosing the internal timecode when pmx "freezes"?
you can display this parameter by double-clicking the sync-control-window (I/O-status) and right-clicking the option "display timecode".
the next time pmx "freezes", you might see that the timecode-light is off for a while...
if yes, the mentionned problem might still be there in some form.


cheers,
benoit

[Pierre-André Aebischer]

Dear All,

Pyramix 4.3.4 includes a correction for a TimeCode freeze bug that could very well address exactly the issue discussed above.

I hope this helps, kind regards