Topic: iRiver IHP-115 scrambling recording

[atxwolfattack]

I have been recording for about a year, and i had seen this happen once in the past, but i just wrote it off as a fluke, but not it has come back and started happening on both of my iRivers. Its like for a few seconds in the recording every once and a while, the sound gets scrambled up, then it goes back to normal, i think its called "dropped samples". I haven't cleared off my recorders in a little while, and luckily last night i was just recording my band jam for archival purposes, but could it be that my recorders either need to be defragmented or reformatted? I was recording on this one with about 2 gigs out of 20 left on the disk and about 25 recordings still on it. Any help is appreciated!

EDIT: And now that i think about it, there was a warning that popped up saying "Warning: 000000002" or something like that, but i just thought that meant it was low on disc space.

[bugg100]

So you didn't say specifically say your running rockbox, but I know you are because that error is a recording buffer overflow.......

You probably should clear some freespace and defragment on a more regular basis.  The real issue is, when did you last update rockbox?  Chuck and I both had this problem simultaneously. He on a 120 and me on 320.  OS has been fixed since then so a new build should not do this at all. 

If you did update and then have the problem again, go to the recording forums at rockbox.org and look around there and report this to Petur and Mmmm there.  Petur may pop in here if he sees this also.  But, mostly don't worry, update, and test!

Good luck,
Joe

[atxwolfattack]

i updated to the newest rockbox about 3 months ago, but have not had this problem in about 30 recordings until now. I am guessing its a good idea to upgrade rockbox, free up some space, and defrag? Do you think this is more of a user thing, or possibly that my hard drive is going bad?

[shaggy]

Here is the specific warning discussion....petur seems to be spankin' sullen for a thread hijack!

http://forums.rockbox.org/index.php?topic=13419.0

You should defragment your drive or at least clear it of unwanted or unneeded junk.  I always run with 6-8GB free....the H120 I have is deadicated to recording, so the space I leave for it always gets dumped of files after transfers.  HD could be going bad but if it is happening on both recorders, maybe it is a current build problem.  FWIW, I still run 7-17-2006!

[atxwolfattack]

Here is the specific warning discussion....petur seems to be spankin' sullen for a thread hijack!

http://forums.rockbox.org/index.php?topic=13419.0

You should defragment your drive or at least clear it of unwanted or unneeded junk.  I always run with 6-8GB free....the H120 I have is deadicated to recording, so the space I leave for it always gets dumped of files after transfers.  HD could be going bad but if it is happening on both recorders, maybe it is a current build problem.  FWIW, I still run 7-17-2006!

thanks Shaggy, Petur says at the bottom...

"I have had weirdness in the past (even before the new codec framework) and attributed it to limited hdd space on a fragmented disk. I had 6GB free and that was clearly too much fragmented. A format fixed it all"

If thats true, then that was my problem, my 115 had 4 gigs, and my 120 had 2 gigs, and the 120 has many more dropped samples than the 115, but the 115 still had them throughout the hour recording.

thanks!!!

[petur]

Here is the specific warning discussion....petur seems to be spankin' sullen for a thread hijack!
http://forums.rockbox.org/index.php?topic=13419.0

Hey, I'm a mod on that forum so I had to do my duties
(he started that post in the middle of another thread, so I moved his post to a new one and told him so)

You should defragment your drive or at least clear it of unwanted or unneeded junk.  I always run with 6-8GB free....the H120 I have is deadicated to recording, so the space I leave for it always gets dumped of files after transfers.  HD could be going bad but if it is happening on both recorders, maybe it is a current build problem.  FWIW, I still run 7-17-2006!

Yes, keep plenty of space free and/or defrag. The problem is that as a disk gets full and or fragmented, it takes more and more time to write the data to the disk because it is constantly hunting for free sectors which are located all over the disk.

I would advise to have more than 10GB free, and if you use it a lot, to defrag from time to time. Make sure the defragger also consolidates free space (sometimes it is an option).

I always use the latest build to do my recordings and have seen no issues with any latest build since at least this summer (before that I had a period of little recording, that is the only reason I say 'since this summer')

[George]

I have an H140 and I always leave 20GB free on it.  As I work on recordings (ie split tracks) and burn them to cdr and back them up on dvdr as flacs, then I delete the dupe raw wav (it also gets backed up to dvdr).

I coulda swore I read a while back that you shouldn't defrag the HDD on your iriver....

[petur]

I coulda swore I read a while back that you shouldn't defrag the HDD on your iriver....

I think the correct hint was that it was faster to format & copy back, defragging is slow. But if you have 20GB free, the risk of fragmentation isn't big (I have 30GB free and not defragged so far)