Korg Forums

When recording to MP3, my PA76X tends to include skips in the audio (just like a faulty CD).

I bought the keyboard just before Covid hit, so it's not that old. And it's running the latest OS.

Any ideas?


Karl

Hi Karl

What device are you recording onto?

Pete

karmathanever wrote:What device are you recording onto?

I'm recording to the KORG DISK.

Avoid to record on KORG DISK .
Try to record on USB or HDD if you own pa4x.
If recording is over 4minutes you might face these pops from time to time.
try not to rec fast,start recording and let some seconds before you start playing.S
ame thing after you stop playing.
Let it record some silence before stop recording.

The bottom line is that the same CPU that is working hard to play the sounds, run the style, add effects to your vocal input, track the controller inputs, scan the touch screen and all the other things that make up the sound in the first place is now also being asked to transcode an MP3 and write it to a stick…

Unfortunately, it’s not really up to the task. What really puzzles me is why the PA4X can’t record .wav format as well as (or instead of) MP3 format. This would require no additional CPU overhead, as this is the format that is being used for the sound engine and what is being sent to the final D/A converters.

If the communication with the HD is fast enough (which it should be), there ought to be no skips at all. It makes no sense to force the CPU to do an on the fly MP3 encoding when it is already pretty busy!

But this issue also exposes how poor and slow the internal data pipes in the archaic hardware that runs the PA4X is. It is LONG past time the Korg arranger line received a 21st century upgrade to its hardware. It is embarrassing that a 2021 keyboard is restricted to 1998 data delivery systems. That samples are being loaded at last century speeds is turning the sampler into something far less useful than it should be. Computers cam move GB’s around in fractions of a second, while we spin our thumbs for minutes waiting for a few hundred MB to load..!

But at least if Korg can’t revamp the hardware, let us record with a native audio format that doesn’t require the CPU to work overtime to transcode on the fly into MP3 format!