What Is Happening When The Sx-1 Is Recording; The Way The Sx-1 Handles Data - Tascam SX-1 Reference Manual

What is happening when the SX-1 is recording

The SX-1 has a very fast hard disk engine, which is
nearly as capable of punching in and out of record as
fast and as many times in thirty seconds as you are.
This performance is a result of the manner in which
the SX-1's hard disk recorder deals with audio data.
Recording passes are written to disk in real time,
after passing through RAM buffers. The speed of the
disk engine itself is achieved by a combination of
buffer maintenance and hardware throughput.
When you are finished recording a pass, the audio
just recorded is placed for playback upon the Take in
the position it was recorded. If data already existed
on the Take in that position (which was seemingly
overwritten), pressing Undo will restore that data. If
at least a slice of the previous audio still exists on a
Take, you can right-click on a waveform and uncover
the rest of the file if you wish.
Basically, a Take is a list of which audio files were
played and when, which is also a simplified descrip-
tion of an EDL – or Edit Decision List.

The way the SX-1 handles data

The disk engine (the disk engine inside the SX-1, and
the MX and MM series machines) handles data a bit
differently from the way that desktop computers do,
in order to take full advantage of the speed of the sys-
tem. As a result, there are a few conventions of desk-
top systems that do not apply to the SX-1.
When you make a Copy of a project, the destination
volume determines the behavior of the copy some-
what.
If you Copy a project from the internal drive to itself:
• All of the Track, Project and Data files are copied
to their new location.
• The Audio Files are not copied.
The reason for this is that the Timeline engine can
freely exchange audio files between projects, and it
can only likes to deal with one copy of the same
audio file at a time.
If you Copy a project from the internal drive to an
external volume, either FAT32 or HFS:
• All of the Track, Project, and Data files are copied
to their new location.
• If the destination volume is FAT 32, the audio files
are copied to their new location with no change.
Part VIII–Data Entry, System & File Management
The SX-1 (and MX-series machines) uses the last
audio placed on the Take as current, which means
that if you were to close the project or shut the
machine down, when you reloaded the project the
audio last loaded on the Take would be what you
would see. Once you shut down the SX-1 or close a
session, you lose the ability to Undo back to a previ-
ous state.
TIP
Remember however, you can always import the Clips
back into a Take from the Clip Browser.
The main concept to understand is, if you wish to
keep all of your record passes as separate Takes (as
opposed to Clips you can always import back into the
project), you'll need to create a new Take before each
record pass. After you are finished recording, you
can always load the different Takes and comp them
together using Mixdown Mode.
• If the destination volume is HFS or HFS+, the
audio files are copied to their new location, and are
converted to SDII in the process.
The reason for this behavior stems from the fact the
SX-1 (and MX-2424) always writes SDII files to
Mac volumes. FAT 32 and BFS volumes must always
use Broadcast Wave files. When a Copy is done from
one volume type to another, the audio files are auto-
matically converted along the way.
TIP
This is actually a very fast way to batch-convert a num-
ber of audio files between formats!
Thus, if you Copy a project from HFS to FAT32 or
vice versa:
• The Data, Track and Project files are copied to their
new locations.
• All of the audio files are converted to the native file
format of the volume.
If you Copy a Project from one volume to another,
and the project already exists on the destination vol-
ume:
• The Data, Track and Project files are copied to their
new locations.
• The SX-1 will search the destination drive, looking
for the audio files that are linked to the project
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