Topic: A scary story with Fostex FR2LE

[qpwoei]

Hi there,

I thought Fostex FR2LE owners should know this. Been using the machine for 5 months now (meaning I know reasonably well how to operate it), and a couple days ago I find myself with a recording 8 hours long.

Take the CF card out of the unit as I always do, put it in the PC internal card reader and... something goes wrong. The reader can't see the card. Ok, don't panic. Take the card out of the reader and back again into it. Nothing happens.

I then try reading it from the Fostex through its USB port and... to my surprise the machine just offers formatting the card... meaning there was no audio folder in it. I guess the card somehow got corrupted while being accessed by the reader, and as I reach the conclusion I go in search of razor blade to cut my veins (well, not really, since the missing recording was an experiment I can easily repeat: noises I made while sleeping, snoring and the like, hence the 8 hours long recording)

The lesson I took home is: if you are the happy owner of a funny card reader, you should better use the USB connection at the Fostex rather than try to read it outside. This provides extra security since the Fostex offers 'locking' the card when you enter USB mode. When the card is locked you can't damage the content. I never had similar problems with SD cards, but CF are.. funny, you know. Hope this helps.

Saludos

[guysonic]

With a single incident of error, it's difficult to point the finger at the cause.  Just reading a card should not write errors into the card in any way, or so I would think.

Since you've been using the deck for awhile, most likely the card developed a fault causing the read error, but hard to tell for sure.   

Try this again using the same card, then use a different identical capacity card if the problem repeats. 

Might also be the deck has issues with filling up one make/production run of card, or filling up a card over a certain capacity causes the deck (or this particular card) to (sometimes) fault. 

Just no way to tell with just one incident of failure.

[qpwoei]

With a single incident of error, it's difficult to point the finger at the cause.  Just reading a card should not write errors into the card in any way, or so I would think.

Actually I can replicate the error at will: just plug/unplug the card a couple times into the reader and the audio folder and its content are gone forever. That's why I think it has to do with the reader, not the recorder... or so I hope!

Yet another unpleasant surprise: the FR2LE wrote messed headers in the huge mp3 eight hours long (192 kB, 650 Mb) that I recorded last night. When trying to open it with Audition it wouldn't load beyond minute 20. Audacity did without problem, however. Of course I discovered this after downloading it via USB to the computer.

Saludos

[it-goes-to-eleven]

Actually I can replicate the error at will: just plug/unplug the card a couple times into the reader and the audio folder and its content are gone forever. That's why I think it has to do with the reader, not the recorder... or so I hope!

What OS are you using?  It isn't clear from your post whether you are using the OS feature to safely unplug the media or just yanking it out?

[qpwoei]

What OS are you using?  It isn't clear from your post whether you are using the OS feature to safely unplug the media or just yanking it out?

Yes, I forgot to mention this point, the failure occurred under WinXPPro-SP2. I then tried to read it under Ubuntu Feisty but to no avail (which is unsurprising since the FAT was presumably damaged by that time). Sorry to tell that all too often I forget using the unplug/unmount option, but in this particular case I had no opportunity to do so as it didn't appear in the device managers (XP or Linux).

I'll do more tests with huge mp3 files in the next days using other cards. Will let know.

Saludos
EDIT: the card with the strange behaviour is a cheap Sandisk 2 Gb

[guysonic]

What OS are you using?  It isn't clear from your post whether you are using the OS feature to safely unplug the media or just yanking it out?

Yes, I forgot to mention this point, the failure occurred under WinXPPro-SP2. I then tried to read it under Ubuntu Feisty but to no avail (which is unsurprising since the FAT was presumably damaged by that time). Sorry to tell that all too often I forget using the unplug/unmount option, but in this particular case I had no opportunity to do so as it didn't appear in the device managers (XP or Linux).

I'll do more tests with huge mp3 files in the next days using other cards. Will let know.

Saludos
EDIT: the card with the strange behaviour is a cheap Sandisk 2 Gb

You should try using a different card as your present card might be broken.

And also realize that while transferring a large MP3 file <2 GIG should be OK and allow the large MP3 file to play in a player, opening it in some editors will cause problems as the open file is at least 5-6 times LARGER size when converted to .wav format for editing purposes. 

You can avoid problems with MP3 editing by limiting the individual recorded size of your individual MP3 files to <0.5 GIG, and likely wiser to set file size to ~0.25 gig (256K) so editor only sees smaller <2 GIG wav file when opening.

[stevetoney]

According to the documentation for the WCM unit I just got from Oade last week, you select in the menu the largest file size that you want; either 2gb or 4 gb in the setup menu.  It says that the size you would select depends on the computer system...I assume that means that people have their harddrive partitioned as NFTS can handle the larger file sizes and people that use FAT32 harddrives should use the smaller size.

You haven't mentioned what specific file charateristics you used, but maybe if your 8 hour recording was at 24 bit and the higher bitrates, maybe you exceeded the file size allowed by the file management system.  Having said this, I did also read that the recording wrote to the CF card as it was being made...which would lead me to believe that you wouldn't lose information when the file exceeded the max size.  OTOH, just because it says so in the manual doesn't mean that it's necessarily true in actual practice...or maybe it depends on how you shut the machine off or some other operating nuance.

Don't know if this is your issue, but just a thought since I'm fresh from reading the manual.

[John Willett]

I presume you *did* eject it from the Fostex properly?

I had a problem with my original FR-2 when I did this - but the files were still on the card and could be read by the PC. 

[qpwoei]

Hi there,

Thank you guys for the tips, I don't think the problem relates to file size, WAVs up to 4 Gb are writen/read correctly in any of my disks (NTFS, FAT32, ext3).

Now, that's the kind of stuff that makes me crazy: I couldn't repeat the failure with a different, better quality card (1 Gb Kingston Elite Pro).  Summing up, that's the way my FR2LE 'interacts'  with the two cards I have at hand:

Sandisk -> MP3 larger than (say) 100 Mb -->> FAILURE
Sandisk -> WAV no matter how large either at 44/16 or 44/24  -->> No problemo

Kingston -> MP3 larger than 100 Mb -->> No problem
Kingston -> WAV no matter how large either at 44/16 or 44/24  -->> No problem

Nice interaction, isn't? Guess there could be something in the way the Fostex creates mp3s that this particular card doesn't like, but can't say for sure. By the way, the machine only makes fixed rate (192 Kb) mp3s, no choices. Seemingly implements a recent version of the Xing encoder. No expert here but to me the Edirol R09 is better in producing compressed audio, with various bit rates to chose and using Fraunhofer's.

Saludos