BR-80 Maximum song size in MTR?

[na_th_an]

A couple of days ago I decided to record several songs in a row, live on my BR-80, using the stereo onboard mics. I was planning on laying down a couple of live tracks, a (mono, DI) bass guitar track, and then a vocal track. I recorded a lot of songs and the session was like 26 minutes long. TR12 contained guitars and the grooves, TR34 contained some keyboard/melodica/extra guitar, TR5 contained a DI bass track, and TR78 contained vocals.

Everything was fine, I had laid down 3 stereo tracks and a mono track, 26 minutes long each, but decided that the vocal track wasn't perfect, so I switched to V2 and began recording a new vocal track. I usually do this, so when a phrase sounds bad, I have an (couple of, sometimes) extra take to make corrections. The problem was that, 16 minutes into the recording, the BR stopped recording, claiming "memory full".

I checked the card, and it had 5Gb free (it's a 8Gb SDHC card).

I decided to use the BRWC to transfer the tracks to the computer, then format the SD, create the song anew and re-import the tracks (at least, the instrumental tracks). The problem is that the tracks were completely corrupted. TR12 and TR34 were fine, but TR5 (bass) and TR78 (vocals) were heavily garbled, with portions of the other tracks inserted here and there.

No worries, I can record this again (and will probably turn out a better performance!), all I wanted is to warn you about this issue. You can lose data if your song grows too big!

Are there any official limits as per song that I should be aware?

[64Guitars]

Quote from page 128 of the BR-80 owner's manual:

"the maximum size of one song is 2 GB"

It also states that 2 GB is enough space for approximately 6 hours of recording on one track. At 26 minutes per track, that works out to about 13.8 tracks. However, that's just an approximation. Track data is stored in a compressed format and the amount of compression depends on the content (some data compresses better than others). Also, there are other things that use memory besides the track data (for example, orphaned data from editing, re-recording, etc.) So, even though you only recorded about 3.6 hours of audio, I suspect that you hit the 2 GB song limit. You can verify this by checking the total size of the corresponding song folder on the memory card. You'll probably find that it's about 2 GB.

[Geir]

Oh .. good thing I forgot to press the post buttom on my reply then I thought it was 1GB on the MR80 as it is on the BR800. So they must have changed filesystem then, or have they found a workaround by using multiple files?

[64Guitars]

I'm not sure what the reason is for the song size limit but I don't think it's the file system. In eBand mode and LIVE REC mode on the BR-80, the maximum file size is 4 GB. I imagine that is the file system limit and it's a result of 32-bit addressing (the maximum unsigned integer that can be stored in 32 bits is 4,294,967,295). So I don't know what is limiting songs on the BR-80 to 2 GB and the BR-800 to 1 GB. Maybe certain song data has to be stored in internal RAM for speed and there isn't enough RAM to support more than 2 GB of song data. But that's just a guess. I'm sure there are other possible reasons for the song limits. Why they're different in the BR-80 and BR-800 is a bit of a mystery though. Maybe the BR-80 has more RAM than the BR-800. Or maybe it's a limit of the internal processor which is most likely different in those two recorders.

[na_th_an]

That makes sense. After all, the card is formatted using a FAT filesystem. The maximum file size has to be 2Gb for any FAT filesystem. The file indexes are signed 32 bits integers, which can store values ranging from -2Gb to 2Gb-1. It seems that the BR80 stores the whole song in the same file. So that's it. I should have read the manual before going rambo! 

The MBR 1Gb limit has to be related to outdated implementation in the physical SD drive, otherwise I'm sure that Boss would have fixed it with an update.

What I have noticed is that songs in the BR80 take much more room than in the MBR. I guess that the 1Gb limit in the MBR and the smaller cards back them forced them to use more losy compression.