Topic: H120 Rockbox lessons learned... Set recording splits

[SmokinJoe]

Learn from my recent mistakes.  If you have an Rockboxed recorder, in the recording settings there are settings to split by time or filesize.  Mine were accidentally set to "off".  Don't do that.

I went to a festival this past weekend, and setup my AKG481 > PS2/AD20 > H120 at a side stage off in the woods.  I left it there running all day Saturday, without hitting STOP/START between sets. So what happened?  I lost it all.  Basically, it won't write a file bigger than 2gb, which is 3hr 14min at 16/44.  Normally when I am watching a show, no one set ever goes more than 3hr, so as long as I stopped it before that time, it's not a problem.  But here I just let it roll and figured I would split up later, when I got home.  Instead when I got home, the files weren't there.  I'm a software guy, and it makes perfect sense to me in 20/20 hindsight, but I didn't think about it up front.  On my R4 and R09 they automatically split at 2GB, and my MR1 splits at 1gb.  It didn't occur to me that this wouldn't do something similar.

Under recording settings, this is a menu "Timer Settings", and under that is "Split Measure" and you can set to "Time" or "Filesize", and then there are other menus for how much time or how big a file you want to split at.  All it amounts to is that when it split files, you join them back together on your computer.

[jbell]

It sucks you lost music!!  I set mine to file size and usually record 1 gig files.  I did double check my setting after reading your post. 

[asobriquet]

Thanks for sharing this info SmokinJoe, I had mine set to off as well.   This'll save me the heartache of lost recordings.

Cheers.

[petur]

This doesn't make any sense at all. If rockbox is writing your recording and hits the 2GB limit, it will just close the file and start a new one, without missing a single sample.

Maybe your batteries ran out? Search for lost clusters or 0-byte files, your recording might be in there....

If not, this is a bug, but last time I checked this worked fine (I admit - some time ago)

[SmokinJoe]

Maybe I do have a buggy version Petur.  I just recently loaded this version, because I had a hard drive failure and had to reload rockbox.

The day this happened I was running rigs on 2 stages and running back and forth.  I had a an external "battery extender" plugged into the iRiver and I'm quite sure the battery didn't die.  I hit "record" in the morning, spent the day running around the festival, and came to check on the H120 rig occasionally.  Every time I checked on it, I made sure the meters were bouncing and the clock was counting... and it always was.  I didn't pay attention to the time on the clock, just that the seconds were counting up.  The only oddity I noticed was at the end of the day, when I hit "STOP" I noticed that it stopped quickly.  Normally it kind of hangs a little bit while it finalizes the file to disk, but it didn't this time.   I shrugged it off.

Then I started it up at midnight and left it running on the late night stage all night. When I fired it up I noticed it said I had 24hours worth of recording left.  I thought that was more than it should be, but shrugged it off.  During that overnight session, I lost the first 6 hours of this recording, and had the last 2 hours.  I hadn't checked to see what I had for files.  I'd been using this thing for 3 years and never had a problem and didn't expect one now.

The next day I happened to be there when the sets changed so I hit STOP/START between each set (1 to 2 hours long each).  So this day I created 3 new files that all worked fine.  When I got home and realized I only had 4 files (the 3 from the second day, and the overnight partial) I did a checkdisk, but didn't see any corruption or 0 size files.

Until recently I had been using an old version of Rockbox, from 2006 or 2007 with REP and that thing worked great for 3 years.  I know I had never lost a file before, but I can't say for sure that I had ever run it more than 2gb worth at a time without hitting stop/start.  When I replaced the hard drive I couldn't find my existing .rockbox backup, so I got one from Chuck, because he had a build with REP.  I was really accustomed to the balance meter in REP and didn't want to give that up.  This build is "isanggon/v.18162".  I was under the impression that it was the last time anyone had built Rockbox with REP.  Perhaps it is buggy, and I should give up my love for the balance meter and go with a new build without REP.

[petur]

I've seen the isanggon build (or actually, his patches), and I can assure you they are hacked together without any knowledge about the internals of rockbox (or of programming in general if I think longer about it).

I will verify with the latest release, and put a note on my list to revisit those balance meters.

Really sorry to hear you lost all those precious recordings.

[petur]

Woha, I just reproduced this with the latest build. Pretty nasty bug... I'm going to check this out and fix asap.


EDIT: the reproduction was flawed, I didn't really reproduce the issue. Further testing didn't reveal anything wrong.

[taylordb]

Just wondering if this bug got fixed.  I'm about to Rockbox a iRiver iHP-120 and don't want to proceed if it will be a bust.  Thanks in advance.

[petur]

It isn't fixed yet, I have been looking at it but so far found no obvious bug from looking at the code. And debugging this takes time (2GB recording each try).

I tried shortening the (hard coded) limit to make debugging faster but for some odd reason that also prevents the bug from showing.

Apart from the above real life has not allowed me to work a lot on it, I hope to do so soon and fix the bug. Until then, feel free to use an older release.

This bug will not make your h120 go bust, so go ahead and rockbox it

[taylordb]

Thanks for the reply.  What older release would you suggest?  Thanks again!

[petur]

since I do not know what the problem is, I can't say since what version the issue came.

If anybody who reads this has a fairly recent version that still splits as it should, please let me know, it will help trace the bug...

[petur]

A short follow-up: I think my initial reproduction of this problem was flawed, as I discovered my h300 was set to a low quality mono recording, so it was perfectly OK to have only 1 file during the night.

I added some extra monitoring and have had two nights recording with correct splitting.

Maybe I'll commit the debug code, it adds [n] in front of the recording size indicator, where n is the number of files created so far. Anybody interested?

In the light of the above, did anybody else experience the automatic splitting not working with a recent version?