Topic: Microtrack ii - dropping out of record. HALP

[cleantone]

I just got this unit. I bought a 30MB/s 4GB Sandisk card. I have the most current firmware. The first time I tried to use the recorder I was doing a seminar. I ran a feed to the Microtrack for "fun". I used the 1/4" inputs. I had a hard time getting it to kick in. I would get a quick burst of sound through the headphones and then it would go into pause. No time elapses on the counter. I gave up for a bit. When I picked it back up later it did go into record and I rolled for like 2 hours. That was 2 days ago. Today I was trying to use the coax from a DAT machine. I recorded one WAV for 70min. I started another and it dropped out of record into pause after 15min. The card has 4 hours of time left on it. I have my settings right. I tried to restart the recording and maybe engage the hold. I can't get it to kick into record. I get the same problem of 1 sec of sound and then pause.

ANYONE know this issue? I ebayed this so I would love to sort it out this weekend. Though I am phishing tomorrow. I was thinking about making a "lot tape" with it.

Anyone?

[DSatz]

Sorry about the spoiled recording. If the digital bitstream going into a MicroTrack II is interrupted even briefly, the recorder switches from record to pause, and won't let you return directly to record; you have to stop and then start a fresh recording. This causes a minimum of about ten seconds' worth of sound to be lost, as I recall.

This happened to me a number of times, and is one of the things that caused me to give up on using this recorder.

[Carlos E. Martinez]

Sorry about the spoiled recording. If the digital bitstream going into a MicroTrack II is interrupted even briefly, the recorder switches from record to pause, and won't let you return directly to record; you have to stop and then start a fresh recording. This causes a minimum of about ten seconds' worth of sound to be lost, as I recall.

Any reason for this happening? Isn't there a way to make things work?

This happened to me a number of times, and is one of the things that caused me to give up on using this recorder.

What did you get to replace it?

[cleantone]

Knock on wood. So far I have used this twice as a back up for live stuff at 24/48 and it was rock solid. It was plugged in to AC for those. I think it was at my house when I had this problem too though.

[DSatz]

Carlos, I was recording a five-day-long series of master classes during the summer, and was driving the MicroTrack II from a preamp/converter (Grace Lunatec V3) that was running on house current. A large air conditioning unit was also being operated. Each time the air conditioner started, the AC voltage dropped below the minimum for the preamp/converter for a short time, and this interrupted its output bitstream, stopping the recorder instantly.

That day I went through numerous stops and starts. That night I went and got a battery supply for the preamp/converter for the remaining four days of recording. -- In the meantime I've found that Grace offers an alternate AC power supply for the V3, one that allows a much wider range of input voltages. That's what I'd use if I had this to do over again now.

I use a Roland R-44 for most recording these days, or sometimes a clunky old laptop computer with an old but extremely reliable Digigram "VxPocket" card, which has an S/P-DIF input.

--best regards

[Carlos E. Martinez]

Carlos, I was recording a five-day-long series of master classes during the summer, and was driving the MicroTrack II from a preamp/converter (Grace Lunatec V3) that was running on house current. A large air conditioning unit was also being operated. Each time the air conditioner started, the AC voltage dropped below the minimum for the preamp/converter for a short time, and this interrupted its output bitstream, stopping the recorder instantly.

Shouldn't that be the normal behaviour: if the bitstream stops, the recording also does? E.g: when I capture a video stream from my camera through 1394 and the stream ends, the capture (recording) also stops. When I do it analog-fashion, through my analog/digital converter the recording goes on, but the video is over really.

That day I went through numerous stops and starts. That night I went and got a battery supply for the preamp/converter for the remaining four days of recording. -- In the meantime I've found that Grace offers an alternate AC power supply for the V3, one that allows a much wider range of input voltages. That's what I'd use if I had this to do over again now.

Both the power supply and that AC line seem to have been doing badly, and certainly something going from 100v to 240v should be the answer.

It doesn't seem to me as the MT's fault.

The reason I asked you this was because I am considering getting one, mentioned on another thread, but I wonder what its problems are.

[DSatz]

No, I don't think that this behavior can be chalked up to engineering necessity, nor is it what either a consumer or a professional user should expect a recorder to do.

VCRs, DVRs and various types of digital audio recorders all sync to incoming signals that contain clock pulses--but if you temporarily disconnect the input, any of those recorders that I've ever worked with (and I've used many kinds over the years) will keep on recording until you press the Stop button. The MicroTtack is the only exception that I know of. It has an internal clock which it uses when analog inputs are being recorded, and it could very well switch over to that--but instead, what might have been a barely audible glitch becomes a serious hole in the recording. And that's the best case--see the quoted material below (a quote from myself, actually).

After the experiences I've had, I would warn anyone away from the MicroTrack. I haven't even tried to sell mine, because I don't think that I can do so in good conscience. At the risk of posting something that I may already have posted here, here's a posting that I posted on a private pro audio list back in January:

R. H. wrote:
 
> The MicroTrak II sounds like a good bet, but I'd like further feedback on that.
 
Very well: I've recorded some 50 hours of material with a MicroTrack II, using its S/P-DIF input for nearly all of that time--some 16-bit, some 24, and all at 44.1 kHz. "When it works, it works" is the best I can say for it. Perhaps I have a defective sample, but some of my problems have also been reported by other users who post on taperssection.com.
 
- I've measured, and can see no sign of the 48-Volt phantom powering that is supposedly available on the unit's balanced analog inputs. Again, perhaps my particular recorder is simply broken; other people seem not to have this problem.
 
- The LCD display is very small. The timing indicators ("time elapsed" and "time remaining") are particularly difficult to read, and the "time remaining" is sometimes wildly incorrect.
 
- If the digital bitstream coming in to the S/P-DIF input is interrupted even for a fraction of a second, the unit stops recording and you have to close the track and start another one, which takes several seconds.
 
- I dubbed an hour of material through the unit's analog (consumer) line-level inputs. They are quite noisy when driven by an unbalanced source. When driven from a balanced source they are said to behave better, but I haven't tested that myself.
 
- The recorder has "frozen" three times for no known reason. One of the recordings was eventually recoverable (by extracting the memory card, attaching it as a drive in a USB card reader, then running "chkdsk /f" from a command window in Windows XP), but the other two were total losses.
 
The most recent freeze-up occurred while I was recording in total darkness and listening through headphones. The headphone output continued to function, as did the little LEDs that flash on and off in response to changes in signal level. It wasn't until the end of the opera when the lights came back on that I found out that I didn't have a recording.
 
The manufacturer claims that their latest firmware version solves the "freeze-up" problem. But the unit behaved quite differently in the three situations, so I don't know whether this fix even tries to address the problem scenarios that I've experienced.
 
But it sure is an inexpensive little recorder, if you don't count a lost recording as a cost.
 
--best regards

[Carlos E. Martinez]

OK. Those are serious things to worry about then.