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M20d Screen Freeze While Performing & Recording


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Hi all,

 

yesterday i recorded my gospel choir (12 mics, 1 e-piano) on a nearly empty Samsung 32 SD-card.

The 'Recording' screen showed nearly 4 hours of free recording time for the card.

 

The first set with 51 minutes was recorded without any issue.

 

At the beginning of the second set something went wrong.

After 10 minutes of recording the m20d became unresponsive and the screen 'froze'.

 

I tried somehow to save the recording but failed.

 

So after a song i decided to switch off and on again, and i lost the recording of about 5 songs.

The system rebooted 'just in time', the audience did not notice and i could record the final 20 minutes of the concert.

 

I was extremely pissed and thought about reprogramming the M20d with a nice big axe.

Hey, the system must not freeze, else it is useless.

 

Did anyone else experience the 'Mixer freezing while performing'-hell??

Is there a cure?

 

Regards,

  case67

 

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I have recorded every show that we have done with the M20d and have not had the system freeze. I have had the recording stop in the middle of a song while using a non-recommended USB stick. A restart of the recording seems to fix that issue. The rest of the system was working fine.

 

I would venture to say that this would be approximately 20-25 gigs without experiencing a total freeze of the system. 

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Hi Case

 

It's certainly not fun when problems happen.  Has this happened only once to you or does it continue to happen?

 

From here I'd just have to guess at the problem, but the first thing I would do is try a different SD card just to rule that out.

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I could analyze the 'frozen recording' files on the SD card.

 

The M20d loaded the recording session but showed a length of 0 seconds for the recording and did not play.

 

In Windows Explorer all files had the same byte-size, about 89 MByte each.

 

When i compressed one of the .wav files with ZIP the resulting .zip was about 72 MByte, so the files were not empty but had audio data in them.

 

Session.dat was corrupted and was missing the information about the channels. (I guess corrupted session.dat is the reason why M20d could not load the recording)

 

Windows Media Player did not load the .wav files and throwed an error message.

 

VLC did load the .wav files and played them without any problem.

 

VLC 'converted' the files to standard Audio CD files that could be saved as .wav

 

I could load the 'converted' files in my DAW Ableton 9.

 

In Ableton most of the files had the same length (about 10min30sec), but some files were about 2 seconds shorter??

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I have had the screen not respond when booting up. Actually just happened pre gig about 45mins ago. Had to reboot several times, and screen calibrate also was not working.. Going to check w Sweetwater and L6 service ticket, see what I need to do. Its working now.. but freaked me out during setup!!

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After a year of no issues and great sound. This problem recently just has happening to me consecutively in my last three gigs. The mixer freezes and become unresponsive for everything, but continues to thankfully output sound. The only remedy I have found is to signal to the MD for a break in the music to reboot the mixer. I'm using a SanDisk Extreme 45MB/s 32GB card to record.  I have always used the same card for all shows.  I also always follow the same process, create new folder with show title and record inputs only to that folder.

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So backing up a bit ... did you create a folder on the SD card for the recording to live in prior to recording?

 

If so, did you ever record into this folder before?

 

Hi Don,

 

- the SD card i use fits the technicals spcifications given by Line6

- I never had any read/write issues with this card

- there were several 'Recordingnnn' folders on the card from previous recording sessions

- i deleted ALL previous recording sessions with the M20d, so i guess there were no recording folders left on the card

- i think i did not create a specific folder for the recording, the folder was created and named automatically by m20d.

- i hope i remember everything correct :-)

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  • 1 month later...

Just had it happen our our board as well.  Had it recording multi-track and mixout to an SD card with an iPad connected for controlling monitor our levels.  Rebooted the device and all is ok.  Kind of annoying and a mystery still.

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Im curious.. how many ipads did you have hooked up? My m20d goes to a standstill when i have more than two controlling the system.

So I've never seen in your posts ... Are you using a dongle or an external router? Specifically which one?

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It's always hard to diagnose a one time failure. It's much easier to diagnose a problem when the gear burns up and you have a lump of charcoal.

 

So the list of possibilities goes like this. You could have a hardware failure but then it would usually always be a problem. You could have a computer glitch caused by a spike from the AC power or from an external device that is plugged into the mixer. In this case you may never have the problem again. Or maybe your SD card just became unseated.

 

I know it's very difficult to take any time at all while you are in the middle of a show to check things and see what's going on. You can certainly send it back to the service dept and have it checked. But if there is no evidence of hardware failure there won't be anything they can do.

 

I would recommend using a UPS type power supply to protect again even short power outs. Of course you have to get one that switches in very quickly.

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So I've never seen in your posts ... Are you using a dongle or an external router? Specifically which one?

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003B20F5E/ref=wms_ohs_product?ie=UTF8&psc=1

 

I'm using the linksys recommended in the manual of the m20d. if that's the issue that's pretty disappointing I spent 100 bucks on a WiFi adapter recommended by Line6 

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  • 4 weeks later...

Happened again today.  Recorded a full session 20-30min without problems from 9:30-10am, but our second set 11am crapped out 10-15min in.

 

Using a Cisco AE1000 for wireless and have only 1 iPad connected for monitoring.   Recording to a Sandisk Ultra 16GB SDHC Class 10 card rated at 30 MB/s

 

http://www.amazon.com/SanDisk-Memory-Frustration-Free-Packaging-SDSDU-016G-AFFP/dp/B007M51J42

 

Looking for any suggestions on what to try next?  May try removing the USB Wifi stick the next time we try to record a session, or record off a PC since recording directly to the board seems unreliable. 

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Have you tried more than one SD card?

Just ordered another type of SD card.    Please comment if it is not compatible.

 

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B007NDL56A/

 

What type of cards does Line6 test with?  Is there a recommendation you can make so we don't run into this problem?

 

I saw an error when we recorded another set as well.  Something to the effect that there were too many signal inputs to write to the card and it couldn't keep up so it just stopped.  Clicking record again did not result in any problems.

 

I suspect that it had a problem recording 15 streams of audio wav files to the card, either processing power or write bandwidth to the SD card.

- L/R Line (1 channel)

- Lav

- Bass

- L/R Keys (2 channels)

- L/R Lead Guitar (2 channels)

- Kick

- Snare

- Hats

- 3 Vocals (3 channels)

- Acoustic Guitar

- L/R Main out mix (1 channel)

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I asked if you had tried recording with a second card to try to rule out card failure.  If you read the Amazon reviews  you'll see about an 8% failure rate for this card.  Cards fail sometimes and if it hits a bad spot the recording can crash.

 

The mixer is capable of recording 20 tracks at once so you are not overloading it (assuming there is not a hardware failure, which is always possible)

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Ok.  Recorded two sessions and did not have a problem at all.  Using a 90MB/s card though.   Not sure if that is preferred over the 30MB/s or what the recommendation is for MB/s.  The rough math shows that I don't need one that fast but it would be nice to have someone validate or doublecheck my math.

 

 

Each track @ 24bit/48Khz = 8.24 MB/min or 0.137 MB/s

20 tracks * 0.137 MB/s = 2.74 MB/s

 

Reference: http://www.sounddevices.com/notes/recorders/record-time/

 

Thanks!

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