Recording Live band with digi 002 rack and G4 lap

[surchur]

I'm a little nervious about recordin a 16 piece swing band live with a lead and 2 backup singers
I was going to drag up my korg hard disk and use a spliter from the board and record 8 channels in
to be able to post produce my main lines in like the lead vocal bgvocals and bass and kick and maybe a stereo pair of condensers for the overall sound. My fear is what I wanted to do is just take my digi 002 rack and my G4 1 gig labtop and just record right into protools. My fear is what if it crashs!!! I would like to know what most of you who have alot of experiance think about using the protools or go with the korg hard disk. The other thing is if I go with protools set up I usually use a external firewire hard drive to write to but someone told me that I ran a higher risk of crashing if I use an external firewire he said just write to the internal hardrive for the show and then pull it over to the firewire drive. he says the bus will get to busy usless I had a 800 port to run that firewire. what do any of you say with all these options I've thrown out. greg 909-662-9171

[Icabod]

Hi surchur,
I've done what you want to do a few times now.
I have a 12" 1GHz PowerBook, external FW drive, 002R and the cheapie Behringer 8 channel A/D converter/mic pre.

I am able to record 16 tracks at once, no problem.

I would recommend setting the buffer to 1024 samples (unless you are trying to use PT LE to send a monitor feed), just to be safe. I have had it set to 256 with no problems though.

The problems I have had were once I got back to the studio.

Back up your data ASAP!! It has been recommended to me to back the data up to the internal drive before leaving the venue, and I think that is a great idea.

I have lost data during editing with a FireWire drive between the 002r and the Powerbook. When I say lost data, I mean the whole hard drive. My drive is both USB2/FW, so I have been using the drive via USB2 for mixing and editing, and so far that has been fine. I haven't tested the track/plug-in limit yet, but so far, no problems that way.

JFreak does this type of think a lot. J recommends partitioning the drive. I haven't done that yet, but I can see that being of benefit as well. Maybe J can chime in?

I haven't tried recording a session to the system drive. I have heard mixed reviews on that. I plan on trying it in the near future, just to see if it will work in an emergency.

The recording has worked fine for me though.

[JFreak]

you need to buy a pcmcia firewire card for your system, then it's crash-proof. that way you will get another firewire BUSS (separate ports don't count!) to your system, and when you put your audio interface (002) to one buss and your hard drive to another, they will both have the whole firewire buss bandwidth for themselves and there will be no problem whatsoever.

lacie pcmcia fw800 card, the best 80 euros i have ever spent.

partitioning will also help, as it will cut seek times. put a 50GB partition in the beginning of the drive and record into that partition (which is at the outer edge of the disc where it operates at the fastest transfer speeds). one more step to optimize the recording stability is to set recording time instead of using open-ended "virtually unlimited" recording. because when you set your recording time, then protools will allocate the required space for each file BEFORE the recording begins. so after it's running, protools just fills the files with relevant data.

you should be able to do it as i have had nothing but success even with my older 667MHz powerbook. with this new 1.25GHz powerbook i'm able to do even foh and monitor mixing at the same time, but then i have to be quite careful as the cpu will hit about 75%

godspeed!

[Brent Flash]

I have about 30 sessions under my belt with a set up similar to the one you are talking about here consisting of a 002R, 1.5 G4 PowerBook, Glyph 120 gig FW drive, all set up like Digi says to do it ( FW to drive, from the drive to the 002R ) with not one problem to report. These sessions are as long as 4 hours in one session with no backup ( I will probably get caught not doing this but the important ones do go to another HD system ), open ended recording time, 18 tracks, and two partitions on this drive.

I would not use this setup at all if it showed any instability before hand. Other systems I use that have had stability issues were found that the causes were from some of the following: anti-virus software running, file saver software, journaling and just about anything running in the background that looks at the drives or writes to the drives in the background except for the system software. Once these were turned off or changed, the systems stabilized and I felt like I could trust them.

But, let me say that if the session is so important that failure could ruin you, don't put your trust in any piece of gear no matter how trust worthy it has been in the past.

[ravid edit]

I was going to start a seperate thread, but this one is similar enough to my situation that I figured I would just jump in here. I was recordinga live show with my Powerbook 1ghz Ti and an Mbox recording to the internal drive. The set was about 1hr 20mins and I was just recording 1 track (just for room ambience for a DVD, band was recorded to ADAT from the board).

The session seemed to record fine and just as I hit the space bar to stop it, I got a kernel panic screen and my Powerbook crashed. There is an 580mb AIFF file in the audio files folder but I can't open it...seems to be corupted.

Obviously there's no way to recover this session but I'm just wondering from others working with a similar set up if there are any tips to avoid this? I also have a 002R, firewire drive and firewire card for my Powerbook and would like to be able to use those at some point to record live audio in a club. Luckily the most important audio for this project was recorded to an ADAT and we can get room sound off the camera audio buy I'd like to be able to use the 002 in place of the ADAT in the future and feel confident that it won't crash and loose the entire session.

I think the main problem is how hot my Powerbook gets combined with a club full of people. I'm definately investing in a fan powered cooling unit for my powerbook but I'm wondering if there are other safety steps anyone recomends?

[Brent Flash]

I'm definately investing in a fan powered cooling unit for my powerbook but I'm wondering if there are other safety steps anyone recomends?

Here is my tip. Don't try to reinvent the wheel. Follow the recommendations Digidesign has provided and you should be OK.

[ravid edit]

yeah....thanks. I have everything set up by the books in the Read Me. Unfortunately, the read me doesn't specify the known issue of Powerbooks running too hot, which is why I was simply asking for advice from any other users who may be running Powerbooks in similar enviorments. If I was trying to "reinvent the wheel", I would custom build a PC for a 1/4 of the price I paid for my Powerbook.

[Brent Flash]

yeah....thanks. I have everything set up by the books in the Read Me. Unfortunately, the read me doesn't specify the known issue of Powerbooks running too hot, which is why I was simply asking for advice from any other users who may be running Powerbooks in similar enviorments. If I was trying to "reinvent the wheel", I would custom build a PC for a 1/4 of the price I paid for my Powerbook.

The G4 I mentioned above that has about 30 sessions to it's credit gets so hot I cannot hold it on my lap for long. That is the way they run normally. If you are experiencing temps that make a smell or smoke you should send it back.