hey all-

i did a search on this and got a bit of info but nothing definitive. I
also posted this at the hd24 yahoo group so sorry to anyone who is
disturbed by the cross-posting.

on two separate occasions my recording on our hd24XR has been
interrupted by an error that says "Buffer underflow/HD is Too Slow."
this only happens while recording - not playback. the machine just
stops.

the first time it was with a maxtor drive. live recording. bad
scene. glad it was just for fun. anyway, we switched the drive to a
seagate and everything has worked fine with it. i have a number of
projects on it and have used the drive since May, no problems.

Until tonight.

we're doing overdubs on one of the projects and we're getting the
error. we put in a new drive - also seagate - copied the songs over to
it and were up and rolling for about 20 minutes...and the error
appeared again on the new drive.

the error is roughly in the same spot everytime when you start at the
head of the song....though more tests showed that it was stopping at
different times when you start elsewhere.

i did a search on the usual recording boards and saw a guy named
ricknroll over at prosound web had this problem and he said it was the
machine - not the drive...he's got no email...i sent him a pm.
everywhere else (including RAP) seemed to say it was a drive problem.

anyone have this problem or any advice for it? studio is down were not
up until we fix it.

we're upgrading the firmware as suggested...any other insight
appreciated. Thanks!

Mike
bombshack.net

mike wrote:

on two separate occasions my recording on our hd24XR has been
interrupted by an error that says "Buffer underflow/HD is Too Slow."
this only happens while recording - not playback. the machine just
stops.

Translating to plain English, that means that a buffer is being sucked
dry, that something is expecting data and there's no data in the buffer
to feed it.

The question is: "Which buffer?"

If it happened only when you were recording, I would expect that the
problem was actually that the disk is too slow, and that it would be a
"buffer overflow" error, not an underflow error. But then I don't speak
Alesis Software.

we're doing overdubs on one of the projects and we're getting the
error. we put in a new drive - also seagate - copied the songs over to
it and were up and rolling for about 20 minutes...and the error
appeared again on the new drive.

When you're overdubbing and punching in, you actually have three
streams competing for the same buffer data, You have the playback (so
you can hear what you're punching in to), the recording (what you're
punching in) and then there's a short period where you have recording
and playback simultaneously during the crossfade when you punch in.
It's possible that when running with 24 tracks at high sample rate,
that you can run out of steam. That's probably a software design
problem and you're not likely to be able to fix it with a faster disk
drive.

Does this happen at 44.1/48 kHz sample rate?

"Does this happen at 44.1/48 kHz sample rate?"

unfortunately, yes. we're only recording @ 48kHz and we only have 13
tracks used at this point. it's vexing.

"But then I don't speak Alesis Software."

ha! what is especially discouraging about this product is the manual is
written in clear english but it is far from complete so anyone
'communicating' with the deck is difficult at best. this error message
isn't even in the manual.

there is a pretty funny joke in the trouble shooting section though:

"problem: can't find spoon.
solution: there is no spoon."

it will be funnier when the thing is recording properly though!

thanks for your help! appreciated. you helped me with a da38 earlier
this year - it ended up having a transport/tape tension issue. :-(

Mike

"mike" wrote in message
oups.com...
"Does this happen at 44.1/48 kHz sample rate?"

unfortunately, yes. we're only recording @ 48kHz and we only have 13
tracks used at this point. it's vexing.

"But then I don't speak Alesis Software."

ha! what is especially discouraging about this product is the manual is
written in clear english but it is far from complete so anyone
'communicating' with the deck is difficult at best. this error message
isn't even in the manual.

there is a pretty funny joke in the trouble shooting section though:

"problem: can't find spoon.
solution: there is no spoon."

it will be funnier when the thing is recording properly though!

thanks for your help! appreciated. you helped me with a da38 earlier
this year - it ended up having a transport/tape tension issue. :-(

Mike



If you are playing back tracks as you record then there is a possibility of
an underflow.
Call Alesis.

Thanks Jona. We did - despite having been told of this problem before
by others as documented on some other forums - they say they know
nothing of the problem.

Mike

thank you all for the help. here's what we did:

1) updated firmware to 1.20.
2) long format on new drive.
3) copied songs to new song before transfer to new drive.
4) scanned drives.

all is working...one of the 4 made a difference as i ran it for 2 hours
last night with no problems. session thursday.

thanks a bunch!

Mike