| We recorded with an X-48 again last night. We got the job done ok, but not without some headaches. The obvious one being the continual "hourglassing". You'd do something really basic like, oh I don't know, saving your project or creating a new project, and everything would lock up... not for 10 seconds, but sometimes 3 minutes or so.
On the up-side, we found that (contrary to Tascam's warnings), it was very happy recording large track counts at 96kHz on an external firewire drive. Which was just as well, because the internal drive filled up in no time at all.... there wasn't even enough space to record two hours of audio. (The GUI presents you with a measure of free space in "percent", which doesn't mean much until you start recording. I timed it and found that the disk was getting eaten up at about 1% every minute... despite starting with a clean drive, we had only 40% left and hadn't finished the first set yet!).
As it turned out, the X-48 was a lot happier recording to the external drive than the internal. On internal the GUI would freeze for a moment or every four seconds or so and the CPU usage meter would hit 80% regularly.
I still believe in the X-48 as a concept. I just hope Tascam are working on getting the software right.
Is anyone interested in starting a mailing list or forum specifically for the X-48? I'd hoped that TascamForums would help users put their heads together, but it doesn't seem very popular - probably explained by the $4 registration fee...
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Paul
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