To anyone who has ever used an FD-8 or FD-4

J

jet-rocker

New member
Is anyone out there still using an FD-8, or are they gone with the wind so to speak?

Anyway I've got this enourmously frustrating problem all of a sudden. The recorder starts freaking out when recording causing a skipping effect on all tracks, not just the ones being recorded to. Trashing my beutiful songs. :(

I haven't quite ruled out the ORB drive that the FD-8 is attached to. But the FD-8 has been known to lock up, and sometimes refuses to stop recording, so go figure.

There were limited posts on a similar problem in this very forum, almost a year.

If anyone has any info they can add, before I bring out the sledgehammer....

Thanx
-Jett Rocker
 
u 2, hey?

we got a similar problem with our FD4- it seems to record ok, and often plays back fine, but then it will just 'go wrong'- skipping, repeating etc. We must have lost at least two complete songs to this thing. Whether it's down to the disk corrupting or the actual machine, i dunno- i put a post up a while ago about this very subject.....
FiL.
 
Sadly its several days past when I could return the bastard machine, but it's still under warranty.

Philly what do you record onto, internal hard drive etc?
If the problem occurs across many diffent types of media it's more likely the fd-8 or fd-4 screwing things up.

In that case, I'll probably have to send the machine to fostex.

Oh well.
Thanx
-Jett Rocker
 
Ours is hooked up to a syquest zip drive thing. We bought second hand, and it came with about 5/6 disks, but i think we've discarded one as being totally screwed... possibly something to do with compression perhaps?
FiL.
 
I've had occassional trouble with the fd8 - skipping during playback or recording. once it even shut down and wouldn't come on again (I FREAKED!). I use an external 6 Gig hard drive for it. Everytime I had a problem with skipping, if i turned off the harddrive and fd8 and turned it back on it always worked. Even when it just shut down, it came back after 10 minutes. I have never had a problem with ruining already recorded songs. Once I remember trying to show some friends some of the stuff I did and it skipped and skipped and skipped on 6 different songs. There is a definite EVIL side to the fd8.
 
lol- good one adam! well, thats certainly an idea! you say you just need to turn off both machine and drive? Any amount of time, or is it an immediate thing? What also happens with ours is that we'll insert a non protected disk, and it will come up as protected, consequently nothing can be saved to it. At the moment it's just a niggling problem, but we're a bit worried it'll turn into a more major "disease"...
FiL.
 
Yeah I was rebooting the machine as described in adam's post,but then the blasted machine started eating my songs.
Unacceptable.....
So yeah, I sent back the drive, the customer service at Castlewood is at least helpful. But fostex refuses, so far (I'll be back at it tommorrow), that there could be a problem w/their machine.
I'll let you guys know how it goes.
-Jet Rocker
 
I haven't used any removable media so I can't comment on the disk issue. I would shut off the fd8 first and then the drive (not sure if order matter, I probably have done it the other way too). I wait like a minute or less. When it shut shut down, it took 10 minutes of it being unplugged before it came back to life. When it skipped when recording I would turn it back on and even have the recorded bit, up until the skip came in, and then it would just go quiet. I am wary about having all of my music on the harddrive (with no backup), and an FD8 that goes all exorcist on me or gets jealous when I share my music with others (it has crashed on me so many times when other are listening!!!). I am looking to use the ADAT out to get the music into one of my computers but haven't gotten around to picking a soundcard or USB device for the transfer. I'm sure the day I buy one and sit down to figure it out, my fostex/harddrive will crash and forever lose everything. I'm just a cynic.
 
jet - that is CRAZY! I can live with the skipping and crashing but it is eating your songs? UNREAL. Can't think of how the fd8 would contribute to this. Their service has always sucked pretty bad. They are in California, so try calling in the beginning or end of their day. I think they really have like one guy working there. He is really kinda short with you, but fairly nice...WHEN you can get him live. My Voice Messages and emails have NEVER beened answered. He helped me pick the right harddrive when I bought the fd8 a year and a half ago. Good luck!
 
Yeah, I'll record onto a track. It will start skipping. And then every track in the song gets biffed and records with the skips. My guess is that it is the fd, just from the stupid diagram in the manual about how information gets stored on the disks. Since the individual tracks aren't stored in same place, the recorder would have to be activating those tracks and re-cording onto them. I don't know. But yeah, I got an email back from that guy and it was fairly rude. said that that my problems would cease if I paid them 250 for them to install one of their hard drives. No way. They can fix the unit or replace it as far as I'm concerned. We'll see how far I get.

-Jett Rocker
 
yes- thats what happens to us! we had 2 songs on 1 zipdisk. Trying to record to the second, it would not record ANYTHING to tracks 3/4 (this the fd4) but brought about 15 secs of audio from the previous song in instead. the previous song was in no way affected, and we're totally confused about the whole business- personally I was worried there was some kinda weird audio virus on all our disks. Likely or no?
 
I don't think that it would be any sort of audio virus. Maybe just a big virus named Fostex. The only place I ever used the disk was in the Fostex. I think that we have the same problem Philly. I'll let you know the final verdict.

-Jett Rocker
 
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