Zoom Gear & Home Recording Forum

Please help me figure this out.

I have recorded a club date in two long 8 channel sets and to make it easier to split into songs I've imported the wav files into audicity. I split the long file by selecting the tracks for each song, copying it into the buffer and then pasting it into a clean audacity project. I then export the files using "Export Multiple". I delete the tracks in the second audacity project and repeat the process for all songs.

Then I create new projects on the R-16, power down the r16 and insert the sd card into my computer where I copy the shortened wav files into the Audio folders in the new r16 projects. I then do Project->File for each of the projects to assign the files to tracks. Playing back the tracks sounds fine, but when I select rec on the master track, press rec on the transport buttons and then play, the song gets scrambled in what seems to be a random but repeatable way. After a while, ghost passages are repeated with a slight delay.

Has anyone experienced this? What might I be doing wrong. Is my r16 broken? Is it some audacity artifact? It doesn't happen with all projects either, but on some songs it does it every time even if i create a new, clean r16 project and copy the files again.

Again, in audition mode it plays fine. It only does this when recording the mix to master.

Any help would be most appreciated.

Thanks

Howard

Have you made sure that the bit rate for the audio files is the same as for the project on the R16? I would expect things to get mangled during playback, not just when trying to mix it down, but can't say for sure because I've never used Audacity that way. In my experience, Audacity works fine for a track or two at a time, but when you give it too much to do simultaneously, it kind of barfs.

OK I think I have a clue what's happening. It seems to only happen if, when I create the blank project, I press enter for [continue] rather than right arrow for [reset]. Somehow this screws up all of the timing. Another clue something's wrong is when the project is hosed the counter does not go directly to zero when I zero it, but stops at some intermediate value for a while before finally going to zero. Also, a bad project seems to take a long time to load.

I guess I have to reset each blank project and lose all of my EQ, fader and EFX settings. It would be nice if you didn't have to throw out the baby with the bath water.

Of course it would be nice if you could easily break apart multi-track projects rather than one track and one split at a marker at a time. If Zoom is listening, how about a firmware update that breaks up the entire project at marker boundaries and creates sub projects. Example, you have a project labeled PRJ000 with tracks MONO-000 thru MONO-007. Place two markers and select auto split. This would yield 3 new sub-projects labeled SP000a thru SP000c preserving EFX, EQ etc containing tracks MONO-000 thru MONO-007. Of course you would need to have enough space left on the SD card to do this.

Any comments etc concerning the functionality of the ZDT files and how they might play into this would be most welcome. Has Zoom published the binary format for these files. They are binary right? It would be cool if they were XML.

Thanks for reading this far.

Howard