Topic: Pair of tracks losing sync

[Steve J]

I recorded a show Saturday, running mics (ORTF)>MOTU Traveler>laptop; and listening back tonight, everything is find until just before the encore, when the tracks suddenly go out of sync...by like about 300ms. Same time, the SBD tracks I recorded, while still in sync (apparently) suddenly go to static. The source for the SBD was an analog feed from a digital board. I did a quick test recording tonight, and everything seems OK (for a ten-minute recording anyway).

I'm thinking something is going wonky in the A/D of the MOTU; but I figured I'd ask here first to see if anyone had experienced something similar. I can understand the static (having experienced it before with other A/D's though not with the MOTU); I've just never had a sync issue pop up like this before.

[hummat]

Not that I know anything, but it might be more of a computer resource issue.  If it started to fail at the end of the night, you could have been running out of buffer space or ram or something along those lines.

A ten minute test would work because you are not really taxing the system at that sort of a run time.

Just a guess.

-jay

[easy jim]

^ I think Jay may be on to something with that.  I've had something similar happen once while running multiple tracks @ 24/48 -> MOTU/Laptop.

[Steve J]

I'm tending to discount the lappy, as it's only two months old, had 170GB available space, two gigs of ram and I was only running DP & TextEdit at the time. I ran this same configuration for two years on my Powerbook (with less ram & hard drive space) and never had this issue. Perhaps I'll try a longer test.

[easy jim]

Hmm...weird. Was there a lot of vibration that may have induced write error(s)?

[Steve J]

No. A relatively quite venue; and I was set up on a steady base at the SBD. Actually, the venue was so quiet & acoustically precise that Cesar, Dave & Steve came out from behind the mics to sing/play to the audience.