The DijonStock Digital Home Recording Support Forum

I'm using the aw16G to record a three piece power trio 8 tracks live. A set runs about 5 gig. By the end of the night there are three "songs" and the disk is pretty full. I'm trying to edit everything down to save space and break the song into individual songs. I'm able to reduce the size of the initial song by deleting talking and space between songs. I run Optimize and there is a slight reduction in size. Then I copy a set, take the copy and delete everything but the first song (from 56 min to 5 min), rename, save and optimize and the 5 min file is STILL exactly the same size as the 56 min one. What's up?

Hi Bones and welcome to the forum.

What's up, well, the optimize sucks.

Some time ago I had a 30 minute project, 4 tracks, around 600 MB. Copied the thing 20 times, and for each copy edit out everything except for the relevant part of 30 to 40 seconds. I expected the optimize to bring it back from 600 MB to around 20 or 30 MB, but I only lost 2 or 3 MB per copy - near nothing.

It took me a lot of effort to persuade Yamaha to reproduce my actions and their last reaction was "well, errr, yes you're right. It has to do with the way the files are organized".

So, how to work around. Make a few new projects. You can export (part of) wavs from the existing projects and import those parts into your new projects. Problem solved. It'll cost you a few CD's and some time.

One thing to look into: there's an option to directly import tracks from existing projects into new projects upon creating them. However I don't know whether you can select parts, or you have to import the complete tracks which would only warrant a part of the solution.

Give it a try and let us know what happens.

_________________

---

Don't judge the coffee by its cup.
The proof of the cheese is in the eating

Yep, that's the way it works. If you delete only a part of a track, then the size of that track on the disk is the original size, not the edited size. Has to do with the way the programmers decided to handle the audio files, I suspect.

You could export a track to a CD and then use a PC program (Audacity is free) to break it into separate tracks. Burn a CD on the PC and then import back into the G as separate songs. Or maybe try an EDIT-COPY of just part of a track to a new track, SAVE the song, switch to a new song and do SONG-IMPORT-TRACK to the new song. See page 144 of the manual. Don't know for sure if this would give a smaller track size, but I think it would.

Welcome to the forum.

_________________
Ralph (aka The Head Hog)
"What's Time to a Hog?"
Hog Time Music Website - My Songs on Bandcamp -

Thanks for the welcomes guys. THEY SAID THAT? Wow.

Before I got your threads I tried something else.

Original file is 56 min, 2.61 Gb. There's 8 live tracks so I copied a small range from the first eight to tracks 9-16. 5 minutes of data. Optimized, saved. New song. 9.5 Mb. Import track ONLY. Track 9 to track 1 of new song. Optimize, save. File jumps to 390 Mb. If I do this will all the tracks, the new song is the same size as the original. Time is 5 min instead of 56 and the file size i the same.

I'm a programmer of sorts myself so this stuff pisses me off.

By the way, I did manage to back about half of it up and dump it in Sonar. Thank the grid for CD-RWs, but it still took 6 hours for HALF of it. Why I'd dump it back in to master it is beyond me. I also have access to a Roland 2480 and that thing has no issues like this.

OK, this is a product from 2002, so I guess there are some excuses there, but to omit something as simple as a USB interface for the hard drive even WITHOUT these kind of issues is just masochistic. Yamaha: hire some musicians if you haven't already.

Sounds like you tried what I suggested before I suggested it. I guess great programming minds think alike. I'm kind of surprised it didn't give you the MB for just the 5 minutes you copied.

The AW1600 has a USB port and operates nearly identically to the G. Might fit your needs better. Available on eBay for $350 to $500.

_________________
Ralph (aka The Head Hog)
"What's Time to a Hog?"
Hog Time Music Website - My Songs on Bandcamp -

It really sucks if the machine gets filled up and there's no gigage left for saving mixdown. That's happened to me a couple of times and I had the same issues. My solution was to mix via stereo outs to my computer. Then delete the song. Only way I could free up enough drive-space.
Bruce

_________________
If humanity is to pass safely through its present crisis on earth, it will be because a majority of individuals are now doing their own thinking". Buckminster Fuller
and..... 'learning to like to do what we have to do.'"