Recording time confussion

[barbecue]

Hey everybody, great forum you got going here. I have been reading it as a guest for a while before I decided on buying the MBR.

I just got it and I'm using the tutorials to get around the steep learning curve.

One thing I can't understand and I'm hoping you guys can clear for me is the following:

Say I have a 1GB card. How much time can I record in high quality ? 502minutes (HIFI) or 94 minutes (WAV) ? What is it, 502 or 94 ?

Thanks !

[64Guitars]

In addition to being a multitrack recorder, the Micro BR can also function as an MP3 player. You switch between Multitrack mode and MP3 mode with the MP3/TRAINER switch.

In Multitrack mode, a 1GB memory card can record about 502 minutes to a single track when the Data Type is set to HiFi (MT2). Track data is compressed using a proprietary algorithm to reduce storage requirements somewhat. Of course, you'll usually record many tracks, not just one. So the actual recording time will be much less and will vary according to the number of tracks recorded and the length of each track. Editing and deleting data also affects the recording time since deleted data continues to occupy memory card space until you perform the Song Optimize function. The actual total recording time is almost impossible to calculate because there are too many variables. But the manual gives the example that if you recorded 4 tracks of equal length, the total recording time would be approximately 1/4 of 502 minutes, which is 125.5 minutes, or just over 2 hours. These times assume that you have no WAV or MP3 files in the MP3 folder.

In MP3 mode, a 1GB memory card can hold about 94 minutes of stereo WAV files or 693 minutes of 192kbps MP3 files in the MP3 folder. WAV files are uncompressed and take up a lot of space, whereas MP3 files are compressed and take far less space on the memory card. These times assume that no tracks have been recorded in multitrack mode.

So, the short answer to your question is that recording time varies depending on the type of data compression, if any. Song tracks in multitrack mode use Roland's proprietary R-DAC compression. MP3 files use MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3 data compression. And WAV files don't use any data compression. Additionally, MP3 files can have several different bit rates which greatly affects the recording time. In addition to the data compression type, there are many other factors that affect recording time, such as number of tracks, track length, amount of edited or deleted data, number of songs, number of MP3 and WAV files, etc.

[barbecue]

Thanks for the fast answer.

So, if I want to go full quality, I should choose Hifi and then dump the tacks to Wav, right ? I'm assuming that I can dump in multiple operations the hifi recordings to wav (because there´s more space to store hifi files than wavs)

Do you know if the Hifi compression is lossless ?

Thanks again,

[64Guitars]

So, if I want to go full quality, I should choose Hifi and then dump the tacks to Wav, right ?

Correct.

I'm assuming that I can dump in multiple operations the hifi recordings to wav (because there´s more space to store hifi files than wavs)

The best way to export multiple tracks to WAV files is with the free BR Wave Converter program from Roland. It allows you to select multiple tracks and convert them to individual WAV files as a batch operation. Also, it creates the WAV file on the computer, not the BR's memory card. So the memory card can be 100% full and the BR Wave Converter will still be able to convert the BR tracks to WAV.

Do you know if the Hifi compression is lossless ?

I believe it is lossless, although I can't say with 100% certainty. I've never seen anything from Roland that said it is definitely lossless. But this page at Electronic Musician's website says that R-DAC is lossless, and all of the BRs use R-DAC compression.

In any case, lossless or not, the quality of HiFi (MT2) is amazing and I doubt that anyone could tell the difference between an R-DAC compressed recording and an uncompressed recording.

[barbecue]

Thank you very much !