My Fostex Has The Jitters

[hairylarry]

Hi,

In the very strange thread carelessorc said.

"It might not be the Jaz drive! Other users have posted about playback problems on the VF: losing bits of a track, or having bits of a track play in the wrong song. They weren't exporting tracks, but otherwise they had the same weird shit as you have experienced. When this has come up it usually turns out to be a corrupt 'management' file on the Fostex or a by-product of a full hard drive. Answer seems to have been: backup the VF hard-drive and format it."

His comment applies to my problem.

My VF160 has the jitters on newly recorded tracks. I did in fact run out of disc space. Since then I have had several successful recordings but now most recordings have the jitters somewhere, some worse than others.

Is the hard drive reformat the recommended first try at solving this problem?

Thanks,

Hairy Larry

[carelessorc]

The first try at solving the problem could be to delete some songs to create empty space. What Fostex doesn't really make clear is that the VF creates temporary files so you can never use the full HD capacity for songs - you always need some 'empty' space.

But the other thing that isn't made clear is that all discs fragment data over time, and the VF has no defrag, only format. So re-formatting should be a regular event anyway. The problem for some users is that before they format, they have to back-up the entire hard drive. The solution is to back-up as you go (I take a backup on an RW CD after every session.) The reason for this is simple, every hard drive WILL fail, sooner or later.

IMHO: get the songs backed up and re-format.

Orc

[hairylarry]

carelessorc,

I always back up as I go. To easy to make a mistake and lose something. Let alone when your hard drive gets the jitters.

My usual procedure is to leave the tracks in place through post. Just so I don't have to restore from backup if I have to redo something.

So I'm in a frenzy of post which for me works out to an hour show every couple of days. So I guess this is putting an end to my post production procrastination.

I just did Pasttime Blue Grass. Their set came out pretty good. Two SM-61s back by the sound board and a Realistic 1070b on the PA. All omnis.

Anyway I'm going to fly through some of this stuff and then format the thing. I had the drive cleared before Blues Fest but I'm new to this and I didn't realize that formatting is a maintenance operation.

Thanks for your help,

Hairy Larry

[Kramer]

My old hard drive ( VF 16) started jittering right before it bit the dust.

[hairylarry]

Hi,

Not really. I haven't formatted it yet but I did delete some files and it's working well again. As soon as I get caught up in my post I'll reformat.

Thanks,

Hairy Larry