right, here's one for someone to explain:
today i made a recording - 1 hour and 20 minutes of a bee hive at the end o=
f
a long metal tube leading into a giant ruined oil tank on the grounds of an=
ex-soviet communal farm in the estonian countryside about 30 minutes outsid=
e
of tartu. obviously, it was the best recording ever made (the fish was
*this* big!), because it no longer exists. after retrieving the recorder
(which had powered off when then disc was full), i listened back. it was
amazing. i listened to the first few minutes, and then a minute or so 10
minutes in, 20 minutes in, 30, and so on, through to the end. the pattern=
of resonances and pitches and the changes therein throughout the long
recording were beautiful. then i hit stop. and that was it. gone.
now, when i say gone, i don't actually mean gone. the track it still there=
,
and it's still the same length. but now it is 1 hour and 20 minutes of
white noise. here are the details:
my hi-md recorder acts up a bit. the buttons are dodgy, don't respond
properly, and some just simply do the wrong thing. it often takes me
several minutes to get into the stupid menu system in record pause in order=
to set a manual record level. and often, when i hit stop it decides i've
asked it to put in a new track mark instead. this is what happened in this=
situation. after listening to several samples of this long recording, i hi=
t
stop, and it put in a new track mark and kept going. so i hit stop again.=
it stopped, and, having inserting a track mark, flashed 'system file
writing.' i immediately tried to play the track (now two, since it put in =
a
track mark) again, and the first (all but a few seconds at the end) was
solid while noise, all the way through. the second track was still bees,
but only once. the next listen showed it to be white noise as well.
what's going on?? how is this possible? i could understand if it had
overwritten the toc with incorrect information and lost the reference to th=
e
data that must still be on the disc. but how could the toc be correct and=
the data have been changed? there was certainly no time for it to overwrit=
e
almost an entire disc's worth of sound with white noise (oh yes, there is
another track at the beginning of the disc, which seems to remain
unaffected). where be my bees???
i don't really hold and hope of retrieving this recording, i would just lik=
e
to have a vague idea of what this devilish beast of a machine might have
done...
patrick
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