Fostex D-160 hard drive / backup questions

E

Electron

New member
My keyboard player has a Fostex D-160. We're pretty casual, but record everything we do each week. He suggested I look into taking the hard drive back to my place at the end of the night, and mixing tracks on my PC over the following week.

What are your thoughts on this? It sounds promising, but can it be done without buying a second D-160, etc?

Is there mixing software that handles this?
 
I have a D160 and to my knowledge the only way open to you, is to mix down off the D160, through a mixer into your PC using Cooledit or some such software.

The recording format on the Fostex is not directly compatable with any PC oriented software as far as I know.

Hopefully Skippy will see this thread and comment......he's the Fostex D series guru around here.

:cool:
 
Thanks for the reply, ausrock. What I've learned since my first post is that with the D-160 version 2, the data in a program can be saved to CD as 16 mono WAV files. Once in that format, I'm confident I could put find software to mix it.

Right now I'm looking into Cakewalk, which I used to use for MIDI sequencing ages ago. Their home studio 2002 product looks like it might do the job, and is very inexpensive.

What I'm looking for is to be able to automate the mixdown, so I don't have to manage 16 tracks at once. That, and cut/copy/paste the tracks into an arrangement worth mixing down in the first place. (A lot of our stuff rambles on about twice as long as it should, gotta trim that down.)

EQ and reverb are a must too, of course. Dynamic processing would be nice. Any suggestions? Thx...
 
Things aren't looking too good right now. The D-160 has a SCSI port for output of WAV files. For a couple hundred bucks I can get one and a bay to put it in, cables etc... but my computer, an IBM A30 Thinkpad, has no SCSI port. Grrr...
 
I just found out that I can get a SCSI card for my A30, which has about 23 gig free hard drive space. But there's another constraint: the D-160 is only compatable with drives that have a FAT-16 file format, which has a 2 gig maximum. (We use about 4 gig each night we record.)

Next theory: get a SCSI card for my old PC, a pentium 166 with a 2 gig FAT-16 drive, and dump the WAV files there. (I haven't used it in a couple years.) Then convert the WAVs to MP3s, burn a CD, and I'm in business. Bring the CD home, turn the MP3s back to WAVs, & start mixing.

Hope the results are worth all this nonsence, because this is getting ridiculous!
 
I got an external 2 gig SCSI drive and formatted it FAT-16 like the Fostex manual says, also a PCMCIA SCSI controller card for my laptop. They work fine, but the Fostex doesn't see the SCSI drive as a DOS format, it wants to reformat it in Fostex's backup format.

From what I've found, this is a widely reported problem and I've yet to see anyone say they've successfully exported WAV files to a SCSI hard drive from a Fostex D-160. I've emailed Fostex on this, but they're maintaining radio silence. Hmmm...

Our workaround is this: the program tracks can be burned directly to a Fostex CD recorder, which results in one very long stereo audio file. Tracks 1 & 2 are followed by 3 & 4, etc. The CD is recorded in real time, so a 5 minute song takes 16 / 2 x 5 = 40 minutes to record.

I convert that to an enormous stereo WAV file, and use some utilities to extract the 16 mono WAV tracks from that. Each track starts with a little chirp, trimming the WAVs to that synchronizes them. Then I import them into Cakewalk. This process takes me around an hour, I hope to get that down to half that.

It looks like I wasted my money on the SCSI hardware, unless Fostex comes through with a solution, but I'm not too optimistic. Excerpt from a thread I saw:


Post#1: >>>>However, you can transfer *.wav files via SCSI to your PC's SCSI HD (and back to fostex).<<<<

Post#2: One would think you could do this, but according to Fostex tech support, you can not. I'm told that the SCSI port only supports JAZ or ZIP, and not HD.
 
If you're computer saavy, there is a freeware linux program that will "rip" the audio from a fostex formated SCSI hd (fdms) and save the tracks as .wav files.

http://www.infinitelyloopy.com/fdms3rip/

If you're not comfortable doing the linux thing, the other option is to use the ADAT out of the D160 into the PC. Preferablly into an audio card with an ADAT in. Sync via MTC or whatever method the D160 supports and dump the tracks that way. That's how I dump from my FD8 into the PC. 2 tracks at a time to and from. Tedious, but it works like a champ.
 
That linux program sounds perfect, exactly what I was looking for at the start of this thread! It does look like a lot of work, though. I've never used linix but have worked in a unix environment for 10 years or so, even done some Perl programming, so I should be able to take on that challenge.

But for now, the method we found that sounds so much like the one you described, is working pretty well. I'm just so relieved to have a method that works at all! Thank you very much for the info, I will persue that at some point. -E.
 
Sounds like a lot of wrong ways around the barn... VF16.com has lots of people to help. The Vf-16 is the same recorder now as the VF-160... that is it now is... it used to not have the same software, but now the current upgrade is the same... so you should find some help.
http://pub15.ezboard.com/bvf16

use your computer to format the SCSI Jazz drive... I have a USB SCSI interface by Xircom which works great. I have a 1 GB Jazz drive. If I had the CD burner like the 160 has I would choose to copy the songs as wave files. 1 song per CD is only allowed. then I could move the CD to any computer . THE CDRW disks can be overwritten with the VF160 ... they don't need formatting as the CDRW do on computers. Read about the naming of tracks if you want to import to the VF160.... and the song must be in the root directory, no folders.

I am working with N-Tracks which is full featured. Cheap and you can get a demo download for free.

http://ntrack.com/

http://216.194.77.119/cgi-bin/ikonboard/ikonboard.cgi

Hope this helps,
God bless you !
 
Well, I just had a chat with Fostex tech support. They confirmed that the D160 does not export WAV files to hard drives, only ZIP & JAZ.

The D160 software appears to work something like this:
1: is a SCSI device connected? YES
2: is it SCSI device #6? YES
3: is it a hard drive? YES
... (no export of WAV files supported)
4: is it in Fostex format? NO
... (it's DOS FAT-16, as per the manual)
5: display the "disk format" menu from setup mode


Grrr...
 
Electron said:
Well, I just had a chat with Fostex tech support. They confirmed that the D160 does not export WAV files to hard drives, only ZIP & JAZ.

The D160 software appears to work something like this:
1: is a SCSI device connected? YES
2: is it SCSI device #6? YES
3: is it a hard drive? YES
... (no export of WAV files supported)
4: is it in Fostex format? NO
... (it's DOS FAT-16, as per the manual)
5: display the "disk format" menu from setup mode


Grrr...
Click to expand...

I've got a scsi zip or a scsi jaz if you're interested....
 
I might be interested in a SCSI jaz drive. But the last time my friend dumped tracks to an audio CD, he accidently skipped the step that creates one long stereo track. Instead, he ended up with 10 tracks. Track 1 and 6 are about 10 seconds of beep, the rest are the 16 D-160 tracks as 8 stereo audio tracks.

This is perfect, they're all the exact same length, and syncronized. All I do now is rip them to stereo WAVs and extract the mono WAVs. This took me only 25 minutes, which I consider very accceptable.
 
I could not find how to format for FAT16 on my computer but did a format of my JAZ drive and it works perfectly... Not when I had the fostex format it.... but when my computer did it worked.

the SCSI Jaz or Zip is needed to upgrade the fostex to current version... 3.1 has new features to save tracks as individual wave files on the plextor drive (160-175 on ebay).

hope this helps. God bless you. Jim
 
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