Here's a change of subject.
Until a week ago, I would have said the R-44 was the best deck I ever owned.
Suddenly, after 30 or more recordings, I started getting the "card too slow, press any key" error.
I did a lot of reading about it. It seems that the R-44 doesn't support too many cards.
But I've never had the problem before. It was easy enough to reformat the card. (16GB Transcend Class 10, I think, but I have 3 different cards I've used and never seen this error. Sandisk 32GB Class 4 & Kingston 16GB Class 10)
It was just before the show and I was running for 10 minutes, and saw the error. Had JUST enough time to reformat and roll again.
But 5 minutes into the music, the error happens again. THis time I pressed any key and it went away.
I figured that was it, but nope: even though the error message never returned, the tape has all kinds of skips throughout. Fucking Ruined.
So I tried all my other cards and the same error persists. I can press any key, like it says, but while it makes the error go away, it also makes a recording with skips throughout.
What's the solution?