1st impressions , questions problems

Hi, I am living in Austria, working in the field of electroacoustics,contemporary and tape music as well as sound art.

After looking for some time for an alternative to my trustworthy Tascam MX 24 I recently stumbled over this great machine. While it will certainly perform also as a recorder on some occasions the main reason for me getting it was as player for multitrack sound installations.

1st of all, THANK YOU for not putting cooling fans on the box. It gives the possibility to hide it in the same room as the audio installation , an important factor since in art galleries or halls where quiet audio is playing , equipment with fans is always an issue.

Another good thing is the small footprint and the ease of use , important since with installations that are exhibited over many days are started by (more or less unskilled) Gallery staff who basically only want to turn a switch instead of going through a complicated startup process every morning.

I got the unit last week and since yesterday it is in use, however there have been a few issues and missing features i’d like to share here, maybe theres a something I have overlooked in the manual:

1 Running in Multitrac Mode I have not been able to set the unit up to play one song in repeat. This will be crucial to the further use , since most galleries are open all day ant the audio material , however long it is, has to play as a loop during opening times.

2. I have a drive attached that has a seperate “on” button , so the starup sequence is : switch on main power, and then switch on power amps and the drive(in whatever sequence). This means that the unit has already booted when the drive is still spinning up. In this special case the “play on boot” setting does not work – a better way to implement this feature is to automaticly start playing as son as the drive goes on line.

3. A “lock” mode for the front panel buttons exept play and stop would be a really handy feature. This could be realized as a double press key combo , e.g. press menu and folder buttons at the same time for 5seconds to lock, then again to unlock.

But at the moment, the most headace gives me the following issue:

I have set up a so g with 28minutes audio material , after pressing play the piece is played back only for 25minutes. After that it stops and resets to the start point.
The problem is that this is not always the case, on some occasions It plays the full 28 minutes and I have not been able to figure out why.
I have scrolled around to start from different points during he setup, is tere a feature to set end points on the machine? (like markers or something like that that define a end point for playback?) Mybe I did something wrong?
I exported wav tracks from nuendo, AFAIK no meta information about markers/locators are implemented in the .wav format so the tracks should be fine and sometimes they are played back for the full duration.
Anyone had issues like that?

The art gallery where the installation is shown opens up again end this week agIn
Would be great to have feedback and solutions to these issues , it’s such a great product fo applications like these but at the moment only of limited use due to the above mentioned things…

Thanks and all the Best

Klaus

PS, this is latest OS version , I updated on friday as soon as i took it out of the box.