Topic: JB3 trouble--please help

[dms]

Any help would be appreciated...

My JB3 is a refurb, very new to me with only a couple of recordings. Never a problem before. I have recorded the same group at the same length in another venue running the JB3 in parallel with an M1 and the recordings were both fine. I run Samson C02 small-diaphragms into an Oade digi-mod UA5 with phantom on, and optical into the JB3. UA5 runs off a 9.6v NiMH battery, JB3 off the internal battery.

On 7/7 I went to a rehearsal (20-person chamber choir + organ) to check the venue and find a spot for the mics. Made some sample recordings at different spots and felt good. Replayed the recordings from the JB3 on headphones and uploaded them via Firewire and listened to the WAV files. Everything was fine.

On 7/8 I cleaned off ~10GB of MP3s that were sharing space with ~1GB of recordings on the JB3 using the Firewire connection. Went to the show, set up, made test recordings during the dress rehearsal to nail the levels with the organ, everything seemed fine. Recorded the show, no peak lights on the UA5, levels looked good on the JB3, monitor sounded fine. Nobody handled the stuff, and I locked the buttons during the first few seconds and didn't touch it for the rest of the show.

Got home and dumped that night's stuff to the PC via Firewire. It ran INSANELY slow and seemed to do a tremendous amount of hard disk seeks (soft clicking from the JB3 har drive). Played the WAVs and all the ones recorded that night are crazy: full-volume clicks and what sounds like <1sec bits of other recordings occur randomly along with minute-long or longer stretches where it's all fine.

When I play it back on the JB3 via headphones there are silent pauses and more disk seeking, but no clicks and no bits of other stuff.

When I transfer a file from the JB3 again, it looks slightly different. Clicks occur in the same places but vary in volume--on one transfer the click will be full volume, another transfer it will be just a little pop.

I have tried transferring via USB but it fails ("make sure the player is properly connected..."). I have tried resetting the JB3 and doing a "Clean Disk".

I've tried to attach a screen shot of the file (stereo 16/44.1, over an hour) from Audacity so you can see what it looks like.

Did deleting the MP3s cause this? Any ideas for how to try to get the main recording file off in one piece?

TIA.

[F.O.Bean]

hmmm, how much has this thing been used???

if it continues to act up, reformat the drive clean too

also, what firmware are you running

[dms]

Firmware is latest 1.40

[F.O.Bean]

try the format, but beware, you'll lose all recordings and mp3's on the HD

or maybe a reload OS is in order, if you go that route, also beware, because if you dont have a copy of 1.40 on your home comp, you can basically make the thing unusable

[dklein]

Two thoughts, both longshots:

1. maybe deleting the 10 GB of mp3s opened up a bunch of space on your drive but the files that got written were badly fragmented because of the way the JB3 manages the file system - that might explain all the hard disc activity.  Could possibly explain glitches if the drive heads coudn't get to the open spaces on the disc fast enough to write data.  But then again, it does sound like the file system is messed up based on the glitches and 'pieces of other music' cmoing through the firewire transfer.  Don't bother wasting time on the USB transfer - the issue appears to be in the JB3 and not the transfer method.

2.  is there any chance that your optical cable was not properly inserted in the JB3 - this is a common problem due to the design of the JB3 input.  Set up at home and see what happens when you play with the cable.  This would also cause some timing issues as the signal is locked/unlocked.

Have you tried running the disc cleanup yet - it doesn't destroy data like formatting - more like a scan disc that should address file system errors.  Pull the battery out, hold the stop button down while reinserting the battery and then press play as soon the screen appears.  That will put you into the menu.  Run the disc cleanup.

Keep us posted!

[dms]

Two thoughts, both longshots:

1. maybe deleting the 10 GB of mp3s opened up a bunch of space on your drive but the files that got written were badly fragmented because of the way the JB3 manages the file system - that might explain all the hard disc activity.  Could possibly explain glitches if the drive heads coudn't get to the open spaces on the disc fast enough to write data.  But then again, it does sound like the file system is messed up based on the glitches and 'pieces of other music' cmoing through the firewire transfer.  Don't bother wasting time on the USB transfer - the issue appears to be in the JB3 and not the transfer method.

2.  is there any chance that your optical cable was not properly inserted in the JB3 - this is a common problem due to the design of the JB3 input.  Set up at home and see what happens when you play with the cable.  This would also cause some timing issues as the signal is locked/unlocked.

Have you tried running the disc cleanup yet - it doesn't destroy data like formatting - more like a scan disc that should address file system errors.  Pull the battery out, hold the stop button down while reinserting the battery and then press play as soon the screen appears.  That will put you into the menu.  Run the disc cleanup.

Keep us posted!

1--That is the theory that best fits the facts, but it doesn't really make sense. The MP3s were all uploaded in one shot, so they should occupy large contiguous blocks. There should have been (both before and after the delete of MP3s) huge contiguous blocks of space available, and no reason for it to scatter parts of the recording (just over an hour at 16/44.1 is less than 600MB) all over the disk.

2--I monitored parts of the recording and I would have heard some of these glitches. It seems significant to me that when I play the recording through the JB3's headphone jack, it mutes and pauses during the problems where it appears to be moving around the disk, while the transferred WAV has those pops.

I ran the disk cleanup and it didn't take more than a few seconds, and didn't help. I think it just rebuilds the list of files; it certainly didn't take long enough to read the whole disk.

Maybe I could take it out and hook it up to a computer and defrag the disk that way without losing the data. Does anybody have any pointers to information on the underlying disk format (NTFS, FAT32, etc?)

[dklein]

Deleting the mp3 would only free up contiguous space if they were originally laid down on a clean, formatted drive.  Otherwise, they too may have been badly fragmented.  Probably no issue in mp3 format as the read requirements are a fraction of what they are for wave formats (reading or writing).  Still a possibility but I agree with you, this shouldn't be the cause.  Even a 4200 rpm laptop drive will have no problem writing wave files at 150 kB/sec.

This may not hold for the JB3 https://sourceforge.net/projects/njbfs/

Best thing to do would be ask these folks http://www.redchairsoftware.com/notmad/

[dms]

Post-mortem, for anyone following the various JB3 threads:

Transplanted the drive into a laptop and booted the laptop from a CD, then used the drive manufacturer's diagnostic program to check it out (it's a Fujitsu MHR2020AT). It passed a quick test but failed the longer test, and now fails the quick test every time. So it looks like the drive is cooked. Proper respect must be paid to the Ultimate Boot CD http://ubcd.sourceforge.net/ which is a great all-in-one tool for diagnosis like this.

I suppose it's reassuring that the JB3 itself isn't at fault, and that our suspicions about this being related to fragmentation were wrong. Still, it's more than a little annoying that Creative's refurb process didn't catch the problem which (in all likelihood) caused this unit to be returned to them in the first place.

Luckily a new drive should set me back less than $100, but I'm going to take some abuse from the group I recorded...