Thanks Charlie, your post is very useful. I am copying this one to a different location (my checklist before a jam exactly where I have a note to run all the PA equipment of the same power to avoid ground loops - red highlighting things I have not been doing or had wrong). Regards, John

My biggest issue with the jams at the moment is the USB drive used to record the 16 tracks out of the mixer.
It has a separate power supply as recommended in the Mixer manual. I noticed that during the mixer test of the drive instead of being high speed it is now recording as medium (good enough). During that jam it was fine. However during the last jam it was cutting out big chunks of the recordings on some of the earlier songs (the first 5 or so songs of the 13 songs recorded). It works fine for data backup. So I am thinking I will get another one the same but 100% dedicated to recording the jam only. The idea here is the final MP3 mix downs will be put on a different drive so that if the dedicated recording drive starts to skip or even have indication it is slowing down I will reformat it hoping that fixes the problem. Being dedicated nothing on it needs to be kept and the formatting will reduce the need for the read/write head to move that far giving it hopefully higher speed and less chance of skipping. I am thinking I won't even erase the old tracks since as soon as I erase tracks it will cause the head to start jumping around to free space. If I just keep adding tracks until it is very close to full that may reduce the number of times I have to do a format. After writing this last sentence it occurred to me that this may in fact be why it cut out on the earlier songs of the jam (Maybe once the write head laid down enough data it no longer needed to skip around to find locations to record on and it was able to record contiguous flow).

Last edited by bowlesj; 04/19/19 05:35 AM.
John Bowles
My playing in my 20s:
https://www.reverbnation.com/johnbowles