Well, I haven't done anything intentionally, and have had no need to learn to do that (setting to mono) anyway. What you show is similar, except that when this first happened,
both Tracks 9 and 10 (of the Stereo pair) were blacked out and unassignable. Eventually, after some of what I described above, 9/10 came back, but the
right side of all the Stereo tracks (10, 12, 14... 32) were blacked as you show above. Again, nothing at all that I have done. It happened immediately after one of the Formats.
I have actually done multiple
full formats since this happened. I only used full format for all of my initial attempts because I was having so much problems with the card. And keep in mind that there are no options other than "full" or "quick" when formatting an SD card. There is no place for "user error."
As I mentioned, I did a
Full Format immediately after installing the Firmware, and I still had the problem of the spotted Track 5 display and the Tascam needing to be crashed to free it up after freezing. See my note above, for yesterday at 9:03 PM. It was after I installed the new firmware and then did a Full Format, and it needed to be crashed, that I received the message "File Not Found -- Make Sys File?"
That was the
first and only time that I then went on to do a "Quick" format. After that, things improved and started working, although it was still showing the ASSIGN anomoly (all right side of Stereo tracks unassignable, without my doing anything to them).
And, in the immediately following post (yesterday 9:15 pm) I indicated that the ASSIGN anomoly was gone. I can guarantee you that I did NOT do anything to resolve that issue, as I had no idea what it meant, why it had occurred in the first place, or any idea how to fix it. I just noticed that it had cleared up after I imported a song and was going to assign inputs for some new tracks.
I highly suspect that this card is unreliable. However, please keep in mind that this is what came to me from the factory, and Tascam does NOT include any USB cable to do importing. I don't consider having to regularly swap SD cards in/out as a very reliable way to move files. For any of my other devices, I leave the SD cards in place and only use USB to move files.
But Tascam did not give me the choice when I first bought it. I placed the order for the USB, along with a new 32G card as soon as the machine arrived, but they won't arrive until sometime this afternoon/evening. The only thing I did wrong was not have the patience to wait a full week before trying to import any songs to work on.
cmaffia:
> Maybe with all the swapping, you inadvertantly damaged the card.
Most of the swapping was done because I was already having problems with the card and could not import files or was forced to in order to get the firmware onto my computer. There is little that you can do to damage the card unless you spill something on it or step on it or something really dumb. I have never damaged any SD card or other digital media before (keep in mind that I am in my 60s and originally worked with very volatile floppy disks in the 1980s as part of various jobs (we did accounting backups on 8" floppies on minicomputers if you can believe!), and tons of other types of media since then).
Regarding "Exporting" files: most of what I was trying to do was importing, not exporting. I believe I only exported one song, "Wooden Ships" which I brought in from my PC, then added some Tascam tracks, and then copied the file back out to my PC for conversion to mp3. I had NO trouble with that Export.
As I mentioned before, I compared the bit rates etc on the songs that Tascam could import and those it could not and they appear the same. I will have to look closer to see if there is any other differences between the files.
I am guessing that, assuming the Tascam is not inconsistently performing the Formats, the SD card was bad from the factory.
In any case, I should receive the new USB cable and 32G SD card this afternoon/evening, so hopefully I won't have any problems after that. As I mentioned, everything seems to be working fine right now. I am going to add a Ric 360/12 to my "Norwegian Wood" recording now. Hopefully it will go smoothly.
And, of course, I will continue with the videos.
Thanks for your help and advice!
Stephen
