recording 18 tracks to SD card drops out

I’m using an Asus E200HA with a XR18 to multitrack record 18 tracks. Both class 10 and U1 micro SD cards produce dropouts (the first dropout occurs about 15 minutes into the recording and then they are progressively more and more frequent). Recording to the internal flash storage seems to be working fine so far, but its space is limited, I can only record about 50 minutes on it.

photo of SD cards: https://imgur.com/nHgJEk6

Windows 10 Home ver.1803
Audacity 3.0.2 built with ASIO support using this guide: https://gist.github.com/SteveALee/da24c2be633340b8791066dd98eb5d0b

Any tips what can I try? Will a U3/V30 card help?

We are not able to provide support for the XR18. I’d suggest that you get in touch with Behringer support.

Because Audacity works with extremely high quality, uncompressed audio, fast internal storage with lots of free space is required. External flash storage is likely to be MUCH slower than an internal drive and will limit the number of tracks that can be recorded or played at the same time.

Also check your sample rate. The default for the Behringer is 48000 Hz. You can change this to 41400 for less data, but most importantly, make sure that the sample rate is the same all around, specifically, the Behringer, Audacity, and Windows all have the same sample rate. For Windows, run “mmsys.cpl” > Recording > XR18 > Properties > Advanced > Default Rate.

I fail to see what does this have to do with behringer. As far as behringer is concerned, a writing speed of 3.5MB/s would be plenty sufficient for recording 18 tracks of 48kHz@24bit. There is something else that must be going on related to how audacity or windows is writing the data to the drive.

I managed to record an hour straight without dropouts, so the card writing speed certainly isn’t the issue here. There were a couple of dropouts clustered before that 1 hour stretch tho, so there is still something going on in there.

so far I’ve had success recording onto a slightly faster usb flash drive without any dropouts

Just that we are not able to help with any aspects of the question that concern the XR18.


Super :slight_smile:
My guess is that you’re running close to the limit of how many tracks at a time can be written to a flash card. Glad to hear that it’s working for you with your “slightly faster” flash drive.

Thanks for the update.