I own a top-quality multiple-channel digital audio recorder -- a Tascam 2488 Neo -- for my part-time hobby and business. Prior to purchasing last year, I made sure that the recorder had a USB port so I could move songs (.wav files) to and from my PC.
The recorder allows me to assign each song a unique name and save it, by name, on the recorder hard drive. The recorder drive has several partitions where songs are saved, but only the FAT (file allocation table) partition can be accessed through the USB port.
The problem is that the songs (.wav files) on the FAT partition are not the actual song names but default names created by the recorder, such as "SONG001.WAV, SONG002.WAV, etc." Also, the songs on the FAT partition all have the same date: 8-22-2008. Therefore, when viewing the recorder files from my PC, there is no way to tell the actual song name or the date the song was created. When dealing with multiple files, this is a hassle.
Worse yet, if I delete file SONG003.wav from the sequence SONG001.wav to SONG007.wav, the next song saved will be named SONG003.wav even though it was created after SONG007.wav.
The recorder manufacturer says this is normal, as 8-22-08 is the default date for Windows 7. And the file renaming "is just the way it is."
This is a really high-performance, state-of-the are digital recorder. You would think the designers could have, at the least, put a unique date on each of the .wav files.
This entry was submitted by Tom Spink and edited by Rob Spiegel.
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First, I wouldn't call the Neo a "high end" digital recorder, I'd call it a pro-sumer grade swiss army knife device, so I sort of get your frustration...but nevermind that - the "only generic" file naming issue upon imports is fairly common to all truly professional platforms. None of the big three concern themselves with friendly name management of end-user naming conventions for importing files - (Avid / Nuendo / Steinberg). All three provide robust file naming tools for newly created content. It may sound counterintuitive to non-professionals and hobbyists, but this is in line with Avid (and others') philosophy that they are about creating new content, not ripping copyrighted materials from consumer CD and MP3 files.
Yes, I work in audio - over 35 years - yes, I do this full time for a living, and yes I work on one of the above platforms for almost two decades.
You might look at Audacity, if you want such robust file naming transfers - Audacity is quite good at that, if memory serves me - and it is free. Audacity is a great piece of collaborative freeware.
That would be incredibly frustrating. For a high end product it sounds to me like the USB capability was added as an afterthought to the design - they focused on doing well for the recorder part and then someone said - hey, we better come up with a way to transfer the files through a USB port since so many people are doing that now...
Tom, it sounds like they need some more sophisticated software engineers.If they are going to use FAT devices, they need to have some sort of database of the songs.It seems like they are relying on the file names alone.They could do so much more.
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