jaymegutierrez blog » boom http://www.jaymegutierrez.com/blog Sun, 07 Dec 2014 19:44:03 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=4.1.41 Error-too many record tracks! http://www.jaymegutierrez.com/blog/error-too-many-record-tracks/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=error-too-many-record-tracks http://www.jaymegutierrez.com/blog/error-too-many-record-tracks/#comments Thu, 09 Sep 2010 16:44:02 +0000 http://jaymegutierrez.com/?p=1387 For those of you who are running cubase on a HP laptop and wondering why you are getting this message come up, even when you’re only recording one track, I think I might have the answer you are looking for.

A while ago, me and my brother (Joe!) were filming a pilot episode, for a series that we want to do, called ‘The Jayme G Show’.
Seeing as we didn’t have any money to fund it, we couldn’t afford to buy the proper equipment for the job, so we had to be creative with what the equipment we already had. Luckily ‘Joe!’ recently got given a boom mic for his camera, as a birthday present. But we still needed something to record the audio on to, and plugging it into the camera’s mic input means that your boom-mic guy is tied to the camera man.
So, seeing as I already had a portable audio interface (the one that we did the video about) ‘The Session I/O‘, we decided to use my laptop.
Here is my setup:
camera microphone
As you can see I have two bags; One with the audio interface in and the other one with my laptop in.
I would set up a project in Cubase, using the ‘Session I/O‘ as the audio device, then press record, shut the laptop and put it in the bag.
The first time I tested this setup, I ran in to a little problem…
After doing a short test recording, I opened up the laptop to see how it went. I then saw an error message in Cubase; (I can’t remember exactly, but it was something like..) ‘Error-too many record tracks’.
What does that mean?
It means that too much information is trying to be recorded at one time for your hard drive to handle.
Now, when doing multi-track recordings it’s understandable for this to happen because if you have a lot of tracks, recording at a high bit rate and sample rate, it can be too much information for the hard drive to handle. (depending on the speed of the hard drive)
But this seemed crazy, I was only recording one 24 bit mono audio track @ 44,100 Hz! That’s nothing!!! How slow must my hard drive be!?
So I started looking for information on the hard drive that I have in my laptop, to see if it was actually this ridiculously slow or if it was something else…

It was something else.

Upon reading up on my hp hard drive I found out that it has a built in:
HP ProtectSmart Hard Drive Protection
This little thing does this:
“Built-in HP ProtectSmart detects if your laptop has been dropped, and during that split-second journey to the floor, it automatically locks your fragile hard drive. This safety mechanism helps prevent the loss of your files and media library from damage caused by the fall.”
Which is great if you’re a cluts with an expensive piece of equipment, but not so great if you’re trying to record audio with the laptop in a bag that keeps setting off the damn ‘HP ProtectSmart‘ because of the movement!
So that was it! Cubase must have thought that the hard drive wasn’t recording fast enough, because when the hp protection thing was triggered, the hard drive wasn’t spinning at all! So it must have assumed that it was because of too many tracks being recorded at once!

All I had to do then, was go to; start menu, control panel, Hp 3D Drive Guard and then disable it! (And also be extra careful not to bump or knock the laptop much, while it was disabled!)

Hope someone finds this useful.. :)

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