QuDrive me insane!

[JonathanParticipant]

Hello All!

I’m a default audio engineer for my church doing my best… For some time, our Qu-32 QuDrive audio recordings have been glitching – audio will randomly (seemingly) stop recording and the start again making it impossible to sync with anything. US Allen&Heath support has recommended I buy a AC powered drive since they believe that issue is a direct result of the drive temporarily losing power, but I’m having trouble finding a drive that is AC powered and somehow fits all of the requirements of the QuDrive. I have viewed the community spreadsheet of compatible drives several times, but without cross referencing all of the drives that will support all of the features of the Qu drive, how in the heck can I find the right one to buy? Is anyone else experiencing recording drops like me? Does anyone know of an AC powered drive that is compatible with QuDrive? Any chance there’s a different problem here?

Side note: I just updated the firmware in the hopes that may help the situation. The Qu-32 is now running 1.95 etc. It had been running 1.9

Thanks so much for helping!

[garyhParticipant]

I’ve been using the same Seagate USB3 Backup Plus portable hard drive (spinner not SSD) for several years, recording our church service to the QuDrive multitrack. In that time it only glitched as you described once, and this was after many months of recording our 90 minute services every Sunday and not formatting it each time as recommended. After the glitch, I reformatted the drive using the board, and no problems since. We tried several thumb drives, but could never find one that worked perfectly, so we stayed with the portable HD. Lately I’ve switched to using an 8 or so year old Windows 7 laptop attached to the USB-B port on the back of the board. I also attach the same portable hard drive to the laptop (I think any fast enough drive would work, maybe even a thumb drive), and record 24 tracks directly to it using the wonderful program, Tracks Live. By using this method, we’re not limited to the 18 tracks of the QuDrive and can record every channel of our Qu-24 if needed. So far I haven’t encountered any glitches or the “noise over USB” that others in this forum have reported. I believe the “noise” issue has something to do with Intel’s design of their USB3 chips (the laptop we’re using has only USB2).

[JonathanParticipant]

Dear garyh,

Thanks a lot for your reply!

1) Is the Seagate USB3 Backup Plus USB-powered or AC powered?
2) When you use your laptop to record directly from the console, do you need anything more than the USB A-B cable? I have an older laptop running Windows 8 and Sony Vegas Pro 9 on it. Do I need another interface to multitrack?
3) Do you recommend only using my laptop’s USB 2.0 port versus the other USB 3.0 ports?

For anyone else, do you know of any other SSD or HDD that are AC powered and also work properly with Qu-Drive?

Thanks for your help!

~jonathan

[garyhParticipant]

1-The Seagate Backup Plus is USB bus powered.

2-You only need to install the Qu driver that can be download from the Qu support page and connect with an A-B usb cable. You can find some tutorials on using Tracks Live on YouTube. It’s pretty easy to use, especially if you create a template with all the channels named and armed ready to record. You just open Tracks Live, select the template, set the project name and location (in my case, to the portable hard drive), and hit the record button.

3-Yes, connect the board to the USB2 port, and if you intend to use a portable drive to record the tracks to instead of the internal drive, attack it to the USB3 port.

[JonathanParticipant]

Thanks a lot, garyh!

Going to look into recording to the lappy as an alternative to the USB-A port on the front of the console. All the best!

~jonathan

[volounteerParticipant]

We have not yet found a USB that works at all.
Brand new board so still looking for a USB that would work.

However, we do record the audio to a cd recorder just fine.
I am new at this job at the church too, so still learning their set up,
but it looks like that device is record only as there is a separate one to play from that goes into an input on the board.

That is a similar idea to using a PC to record tracks.
We only need the one track, so one channel output from the QU32 is fine for us.

If you need multiple channels to edit and mix later then the PC approach seems to be the answer to the USB problems.

[ScottParticipant]

I had a WD Passport drive which worked well in the past. Since upgrading the Qu to the latest firmware, Qu-Drive would only record for about 10 minutes then stop (stereo mode) on both this HD or USB sticks, leaving the files corrupted.

I downgraded the Firmware to v1.90 and found that it can now record again on those same devices without any issue.

[garyhParticipant]

Scott, thank you for this info. I was thinking of upgrading the firmware on our church’s board, but now I think I’ll hold off. If it ain’t broken, don’t fix it.

[Anonymous]

@scott
I find that really weird that you have had to go back to firmware 1.9 from the latest 1.95 ?

[JonathanParticipant]

So, since my initial post, I found an old seagate USB HDD that will record stereo and multitrack without issue…wait for it…

If you format the drive every time the board is turned on to be used to record. I have successful recordings now of services on 6/23 and 6/30. Whatever. If it works, it works. I’m already doing some other pretty creative gaff-tapery in this job, why not this?

[ScottParticipant]

We had v1.95 on mixer, but hadn’t recorded direct to USB in a long time. I had done it in the past with and went back and looked at the timestamps on my firmware downloads folder and decided that it was working either on v1.80 or on v1.90.

To clarify, since v1.90 worked fine, I didn’t bother trying v1.93. This is for a church and it needs to be reliable, and being on v1.90 seemed to do the trick, so we left it on that version.

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