Using the modified Roland VS-2400CD recorder : part 2

Last year, I wrote a blog post detailing how to do a hardware modification to the Roland VS-2400CD to add an eSATA port and and breathe new life into it.

I promised a follow-up post about how to take advantage of the modification to transfer projects to your PC. This post is long overdue.

Background information

The VS-2400CD uses a FAT32 file system on the hard disk. There are several major limitations to keep in mind :

1. The VS-2400CD maximum hard drive size is 120GB . Larger drives can be used, but the VS-2400CD cannot see anything above 120GB.
2. The VS-2400CD maximum partition size is 10GB. On the standard 40GB hard drive, this means there will be 4 partitions. On a drive of 120GB or more, there will be 12 partitions
3. The original PC had a limit of a 4 primary partitions per hard disk. This still persists today. For this reason, only the first 4 partitions on your VS-2400CD can be directly seen by your operating system when you attach the VS-2400CD hard drive to the PC.

Since you have taken advantage of the eSATA hardware modification, you likely now have a larger drive than the original 40GB that came with your VS-2400CD, and thus you will have to use special software see the partitions beyond the 4th on your computer.


The only program I know that does this is called VS Wave Export, and runs on Windows.

Initial computer setup under Windows 7

1. download VS Wave Export
2. since there is no installer, you will need to unzip it to a folder of your choice
3. create a shortcut on your desktop to the executable 
4. edit the shortcut properties, and enable the option to "Run this program as an administrator" . If you forget this step, VS Wave export will not see your VS-2400CD hard drive 
5. in the Control panel, search for "partition" and click "create and format hard disk partitions"
6. make sure your VS-2400CD and the disk enclosures are both turned off.
7. connect the disk enclosure that contains your VS-2400CD hard drive to the PC via USB .
8. turn on the disk enclosure
9. you may get prompted 4 times to "autoplay" the content of VS partitions . Don't do it - just stop the autoplay.
10. the disk will show up in the "Disk Management" screen . It will look something like this :
    
11. Click button 2 (Right-click) on the first VS-2400CD partition, and select "Change drive letter and paths"
12. Click "Remove" and confirm
13. Repeat steps 10 and 11 for the other three VS-2400CD partitions. This ensures that the operating system is not accessing the drive, and thus will make it available to VS Wave Export.
14. You can now close the disk manager

Using VS Wave Export to export your projects to WAV files

1. If your VS-2400CD is on, turn it off
2. connect the disk enclosure that contains your VS-2400CD hard drive to the PC via USB .
3. turn on the disk enclosure.
4. Run VS Wave Export from your desktop shortcut. You should get prompted to run it as administrator. You must accept.
5. You will now see something like this :
   
6. The above shows all 11 partitions on my VS-2400CD hard drive
7. Click the + on one or more partitions. It will show the projects on those partitions :
   
8.  click the project to export
9. select the tracks you want to export in the matrix on the right. There are up to 384 V-tracks. In most cases, just select "All". The selected tracks will be highlighted in red
10. if you want only part of the timeline, select specific start/end times.
11. click the folder to select the destination for your WAV files
12. click "export" and wait
13. That's it ! You should now have a bunch of WAV files for all your tracks.
    
14. Each of the WAV file is mono and uncompressed. The files are named
    $project name" "$sampling_rate"_"$track"-"$vtrack"_"$trackname
    In my case, the track names are each of the 9 microphones I use.

The above method is what I use primarily now as I just use the VS-2400CD to record. I do all my mixing and editing on the PC, which is much faster with Reaper. I never feed any data back from the PC to the VS-2400CD. If your workflow is like mine, you may never need to do anything else.

However, there may be some times during which you will want to backup the actual VS-2400CD projects to your computer, and later restore them. One such occasion would be for example if you want to change change your VS-2400CD hard drive. I did this today - I upgraded from a loud WD 160GB hard drive to a whisper quiet 64GB Patriot SSD.

Backing up all the projects on a VS-2400CD partition to your PC

1. in the Control panel, search for "partition" and click "create and format hard disk partitions"
2. make sure your VS-2400CD and the disk enclosures are both turned off.
3. connect the disk enclosure that contains your VS-2400CD hard drive to the PC via USB .
4. turn on the disk enclosure
5. the disk will show up in the "Disk Management" screen. You will see the first four VS-2400CD partitions
6. select the partition you want to backup, click button 2 (Right-click) , and select "Change drive letter and paths"
7. select "Add"
8. select "Assign the following drive letter"
9. choose a drive letter
10. click OK
11. Autoplay might come up. Select "Open folder to view files". If it doesn't come up, go to "Computer" and just double-click the drive letter you assigned
12. Backup all the files on this drive letter using a method of your choice, for example, to another hard drive, online storage area, DVD, tape, etc.
13. in the Control panel, search for "partition" and click "create and format hard disk partitions"
14. select the partition you want to backup, click button 2 (Right-click) , and select "Change drive letter and paths".
15. click "Remove" and confirm

This method only works for backing up the first 4 partitions of the VS-2400CD . Unfortunately, you cannot mount partitions 5 to 11 on the PC this way. If you need to backup the projects on these partitions, you may have to move projects to partitions 1-4 using the VS-2400CD first . It will be slow, but not nearly as painful as using CD-R/CD-RW to backup the data.

Restoring all the projects from your PC to a VS-2400CD partition

1. using the VS-2400CD, empty one of the first four partitions on the disk. You must delete all the projects on a selected partition to make space for the restore.
2. when this is done, shut down your VS-2400CD and disk enclosure.
3. in the Control panel, search for "partition" and click "create and format hard disk partitions"
4. connect the disk enclosure that contains your VS-2400CD hard drive to the PC via USB .
5. turn on the disk enclosure
6. the disk will show up in the "Disk Management" screen. You will see the first four VS-2400CD partitions
7. select the VS-2400CD partition you want to restore to, click button 2 (Right-click) , and select "Change drive letter and paths"
8. select "Add"
9. select "Assign the following drive letter"
10. choose a drive letter
11. click OK
12. Autoplay might come up. Select "Open folder to view files". If it doesn't come up, go to "Computer" and just double-click the drive letter you assigned
13. Examine the files on the VS-2400CD partition. Make sure sure this is really the freshly emptied VS partition you want to restore to There will typically be one project directory only, with very few files inside.
14. When you are sure, delete all the files and directories on that partition. This is required to clean up the project index.
15. Restore all the files from your previous backp
16. in the Control panel, search for "partition" and click "create and format hard disk partitions"
17. select the partition you want to backup, click button 2 (Right-click) , and select "Change drive letter and paths".
18. click "Remove" and confirm

Again, this method only works for restoring to one of the first 4 partitions of the VS-2400CD .
If you have more partitions to restore, you can use the VS-2400CD first to move projects between partitions 1-4 and 5-11 . It will be slow, but not nearly as painful as using CD-R/CD-RW to backup the data.



Backing up and restoring individual projects

This procedure is more complex and I'm not going to attempt to write it down in details as I don't use it. Basically, you will need to copy/restore the content of individual song directories.

The complexity comes from the index file in the root directory of each VS-2400CD partition. You would need to manually update that index file to keep things in sync. This poses a problem if you want to restore a project to an empty parttion. You would have to first create an empty project on the VS-2400CD partition, then swap the files on the PC.

I hope this will be helpful to all those who have modified their VS-2400CD.

PowerDirector 9 performance problem on AMD Phenom 1055T (update)

This is a follow-up to my post from last year about PowerDirector performance .

I am unhappy to report that Cyberlink has not been helpful solving this problem. They just closed my ticket CS001052755 without any explanation. So, I opened a new ticket. All they would say is that "The performance issue is related with different graphics card drivers and platforms. " without any more specifics. Given that I am running the same graphics card with the same drivers on both of my machines, I would have expected more details. If the problem lies with the nVidia drivers, then I would like to know that and escalate the issue to them. I'm still in the dark as to what causes the software to run faster on a 2007 system than a 2011 system.

To recap, I have two systems that are very similar except for their CPU.
They both run Windows 7 Ultimate x64 SP1.
They both have an XFX 9800GT video card with 512MB of RAM .
They now both have 16GB of RAM.
The main relevant difference is the CPU/motherboard.

One system (designated "Intel") uses an 5-year old Core 2 Quad Q600 at 2.4 GHz. The 16 GB of RAM is DDR2-800. The video card is in a PCI-E 1.0 x16 slot. It is running with a SATA2 SSD and a 4TB RAID 0 array.

The other (designated "AMD") uses a 1-year old AMD Phenom II x6 1055T at 2.8 GHz . The 16 GB of RAM is DDR3-1333.  The video card is in a PCI-E 2.0 x16 slot. It is running with dual SATA3 SSD and a pair of 2TB drives.

Both are running with the same set of nVidia drivers 296.10.

I would expect the AMD system performance to always be faster, due to the faster CPU. All the other components are at least equal or better.  Unfortunately, this is not so.

I created a shorter HD video clip from a JVC GZ-E10 camcorder for the purpose of testing the performance. It is 189MB in size. The consists of just putting this clip on video track 1, and encoding. I am only testing the H.264 encoding performance. All times below are in seconds.

Video : Benchmark2

Target file format

H264

Target resolution

1920x1080

Target bit rate

24 Mbps

Fast video rendering

Yes

Yes

No

Yes

Yes

No

Yes

Yes

No

Yes

Yes

No

Hardware encoding

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

SVRT

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

CUDA

Yes

Yes

Yes

No

No

No

Yes

Yes

Yes

No

No

No

Hardware decoding

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

No

No

No

No

No

No

AMD – PD9 64-bit 3305

4

145

145

4

145

145

4

40

123

4

40

124

Intel – PD9 64-bit 3305

8

64

207

8

64

208

8

71

217

8

71

215

AMD – PD9 64-bit 3305 – 1x9800GT Catalyst installed

52

52

40

40

AMD – PD9 64-bit 3305 – 2x9800GT– Catalyst installed

52

52

40

40

AMD – PD9 64-bit 3305 – 1x19800GT in x8 slot – Catalyst installed

54

54

41

41

AMD – PD9 64-bit 3305 – 1x560 Ti– Catalyst installed

31

31

38

38

Here are my observations and takeaways from all this data :

• enabling or disabling CUDA  appears to have no effect on the rendering time
• when SVRT is available, the rendering takes only half as long on the AMD system vs the Intel system - 4 seconds vs 8 seconds. This doesn't quite scale linearly with larger files, but the AMD still keeps a large advantage. This is as expected.
• when the "fast video rendering" option is disabled, again the rendering is much faster on AMD. The AMD system clocks in at 123 to 145 seconds, while Intel takes 207 to 215 . This is as expected.
• When using the "Fast video rendering" together with "Hardware encoding" options, performance is much worse on the AMD : it takes 145 seconds vs only 64 seconds on the Intel system ! This is NOT expected. This led me to experiment with another one of the program's global preferences :the "Hardware decoding" option. When I turned that preference OFF, miraculously the rendering time on AMD dropped from 145 seconds to 40 seconds. But on Intel, it increased from 64 to 71 seconds.
• on the AMD system, when the hardware decoding preference is ON, the rendering time is identical whether the hardware encoder option is set to ON or OFF - 145 seconds. This tells me that the hardware encoder is not actually being used at all.
• My conclusion is that there is something very wrong with the way hardware decoding affects the performance of encodings in PowerDirector 9 on the AMD system. It appears the hardware encoder must be turned off on the AMD.
• april 7 update : after I reinstalled the ATI Catalyst drivers for the motherboard, the performance changed and became closer to what was expected . I added a 3rd line for this.
• with Catalyst installed, there is now evidence that the hardware encoder is used, even when hardware decoding is enabled. For example, line 3, column 2 is 52 seconds vs 145s for line 1 column 3 (full software encoder). However, disabling hardware decoding is still faster : line 3 column 8 gives a time of 40s. My guess is the GPU is spread too thin doing both decoding and encoding. With the combination of the AMD 1055T CPU and 9800GT GPU, it's better to decide with the CPU and encode with the GPU, ie. line 3 column 8.
• I experimented with having both XFX 9800GT cards. The cards are nearly identical except for the revision. One takes a PCI-E power connector and the other doesn't. I put the results in line 4. The results are identical to line 3. In other words, PowerDirector didn't benefit at all from having 2 GPUs in the system. Note that the motherboard is non-SLI. I don't know if it would have made a difference for PowerDirector or not if it supported SLI. So far, no one has ever provided any evidence that PowerDirector can use multiple GPUs.
• I also experimented with a single 9800GT GPU in the second PCI-E slot, ie. the x8 slot. The results were slower, but not significantly so. Compare line 3 which used the x16 slot with line 4 which used the x8 slot. Times went from 52 to 54s when the GPU was doing both decoding and encoding in hardware.; and from 40 to 41s when the GPU was doing encoding only
• finally, I purchased an Asus 560 Ti GPU video card tonight. This is the the largest card I can fit in the case. It's within 1mm of touching the drives. The card is spec'ed s 9", but that's only the length of the PCB - it is really closer to 10" when counting the length of the fan. The results are listed on the last and 5th line.
• With the 560 Ti, finally, the best results are when using the GPU for both encoding and decoding. Line 5 column 2 is 31s which is the best time of the whole table. When disabling hardware decoding, time increases to 38s in column 8. This means the encoding takes approximately 77.5% of the time with the 560 Ti  vs the 9800GT . I am not sure if a 22.5% decrease in rendering time is worth the $240 I paid.
• I also bought a better CPU cooler, a Hyperx 212 I will try to overclock the 1055T CPU a little bit.

Goldberg week

I listen to NPR and the Goldberg Variations almost every day.

So how did I manage to miss last week's "Goldberg week" on NPR ?

Goldberg Variation 4, with video

I got a second camcorder yesterday and did a quick video with both of them. No professional audio for this take.

Goldberg Variation N°4 recording

I just made this recording of Bach's Goldberg Variation N°4 .

Opting out of Facebook sponsored stories ?

I have started noticing "Sponsored stories" on Facebook.
There is a sidebar that says "So and so likes WalMart".
There is a little X you can click to have this ad stop.
If you do, Facebook will tell you :

"Sponsored Stories hidden

We'll try not to show you sponsored stories from Walmart."

 

TRY is the operative word.  Every day, Facebook continues to show me the same sidebar ad, about the same person liking the same stupid company, Walmart.

 

Walmart, please take note of this. I didn't like you before, but now that I see these annoying ads, I like you even less.

 

Facebook, why are you pretending that it is possible to opt out of ads if you going to just ignore the user's preferences ?

Getting around a locked account in Windows 7

Last friday, my work laptop running Windows 7 was complaining that I needed to change the password. So, I did.

Over the weekend, I turned it on at home and tried to login. It was hooked up to my KVM switch, with an AZERTY keyboard on it. Between the mismatched keyboard layout and the new password, I managed to get the account locked. No new attempts to login to the account could be made. Even if I had the right password ! Windows kept complaining that "the account had been locked".

The solution was very simple :
1. Reboot the computer. This required holding the power button
2. Go to the BIOS menu
3. Change the computer's date . I moved it 3 days in the future.
4. Restart Windows

Voila - account no longer locked. I got to make more attempts, and managed to login.
I hope this helps somebody else. This is one OS security measure that was easily defeated.