Is 5.0.6 storing the wrong 24 bits?

Live recording didn’t work

I just recently tried to record 10 tracks at 48khz/24bits on a Gateway Windows XP laptop with a EMU 1616 sound card and a ADA8000 a/d to adat processor. I was using ASIO drivers for in and out. I had just recently upgraded both n-track and the drivers/mixing app for the EMU 1616

Here’s what happened
- When recording I would see reasonable waveforms in the channel windows
- For some reason I could not get the output of ntrack routed back to the EMU patchmix application
- After I saved the files and reloaded them the played back as static (white) noise
- If I rescanned the waveforms the previews when from what looked like I saw to a solid block (from top to bottom) EXCEPT for a few places where things were quiet
- If I played these sections they work ok

My conclusion is that the wrong data is being played back which may have been caused by storing the wrong data

Ie I think that the sound card returned the data in the top 3 bytes of a 4 byte DWORD and that ntack stored the bottom 3 bytes.

I had noticed that when I selected options the were options for 24 bit and left-justified 24-bit as well as 16 (I’m not in front of the machine so I’m doing this from memory).

I also tried the “fix waveform” option in the file menu, but I don’t know what the proper header size option should be.

My big question is how can I tell if the actual data is in the files? That is is the problem that the upper 8 bytes were not saved or that the file header has been written in a way that its playing the wrong 24 bits when loaded?

The second obvious question is how do I prevent this problem in the future?

I haven’t had a chance to retest things yet so if there are things you’d like me to try please let me know…

I don;t have an answer, but try recording with an app other than n-Track (audacity, wavosaur, soundforge, etc). At least confirm that it’s n-Track that’s recording wrong and not some other part of your setup causing the trouble.

I’ll do some more testing this weekend to see if I can confirm whether its n-track or the drivers.

I just wanted to see if anyone else had the same problem (and hopefully a solution)

You may have to try another file format as the “File Save As”… Click on the Hammer in the playback meter… The window/screen will open … You’ll see a number of options there to “Save-As” Some audio cards work with selecting the “Right” combinations of audio formats… It’s a place to start… There may be other issues… who knows?

Bill…

Have you tried opening the files in another program? I had what sounds like the same problem a couple months ago, but the files were okay when I opened them in an editor. So I deleted the nTrack peak files, and re-opened the song. N re-built the .npk files, and everything turned out okay; I still don’t know what happened, but the fix was so easy I quit worrying about it afterwards!

Good luck!
Tony W

opening the file in sound forge and Cubase LE produced the same output. This leads be to believe that the file is hosed. I have a small hope that all the data is still there and its just in the wrong order but its a very small hope…

As I mentioned early the peak files saved during recording looked right but when I rescanned they changed to solid full-scale values except in the quiet parts