Questions & Answers

Multiple track recording on SD-card on StudioLive 32R

+15 votes
2,735 views
asked May 22, 2019 in StudioLive Series Feature Requests by jensrder (580 points)
Dear developpers,

Would it be possible to allow on the StudioLive 32R to write multiple tracks in raw on the SC-card?

I would appreciate it, as I am recording classical music in historical halls where I may not have the space sound engineering room. If I would just use the StudioLive 32R behind the stage, plug the mics and set the gain via ipad, it just misses the ability of raw multi track recording into SD that I could start with the ipad. As I cannot make the mix during recording, the stereo writing on SD is insufficient. 32 tracks of 48 kSamples a 24 bit is less than 5 MByte/s and should not be a problem for SD cards at all. If you could change that, I would only need this one box though, that would simplify things tramendously. I also think this would be a good backup system, if attached computers for recording may have issues. A stable backup would give a great bonus for your systems too.

I am looking forward for your feedback.

with best wishes from Germany

Dr. Jens Röder

4 Answers

+1 vote
answered May 22, 2019 by wahlerstudios (105,310 points)
selected May 23, 2019 by benpierce
 
Best answer

This request comes up very often, but there is no other answer than given in this thread: https://answers.presonus.com/40755/when-do-we-get-sd-card-multitrack-recording-on-sl16r. Why not using a laptop? Doesn't take space, needs only a single USB cable and you can record directly in Studio One with/without processing. Just saying. Next comes the standard reply "Thank you for your feature request..."

+6 votes
answered Jun 28, 2019 by robertsimpson (280 points)
I agree with Jens on this.  The 32R is a series III mixer, so it would seem that the hardware should be similar enough to the other series III mixers that it could share the feature of multitrack recording to SD.  Even the ********* X32 mixers have this capability, and in my eyes, they are inferior products in most areas to Presonus products.  I think all of you Series III Rackmount Mixer owners would really appreciate this feature, if you could add it via a firmware update.
–3 votes
answered Jun 29, 2019 by wahlerstudios (105,310 points)
A Series III rack mixer with a multitrack SD recorder would have been noticeable more expensive, but PreSonus wanted to make the rack mixers simply cheaper = more availabe than their predecessors. There is no way to "solve" this by a firmware upgrade, because there is no hardware allowing the change. Nowadays representatives of PreSonus are clear about this fact and say that the Series III 32R, 24R and 16R rack mixers will NEVER be able to do multi-tracking.

But you never know. Things might be different with a 48R or 64R or the Series IV mixers...
+5 votes
answered Dec 10, 2020 by erhardschwenk (2,100 points)
There is a whole Bunch of reasons why _not_ using a Laptop for this.

A Laptop means one more device to unpack, setup, power up, remove and pack on each Gig, consuming valuable time. It means one more bag in Car, one more source of mistakes and breakdowns, two more Cables (Power and USB) which can be forgotten, broken or cause accidents.

Especially with Rack Mixers this _are_ valid and important Arguments. Those Mixers are chosen because the user wants to keep his gear compact, highly mobile, easy to use and fast to install/remove on any stage. Any space usage for a Laptop (and there is no Laptop that uses no space) is too much here.

Needing a Tablet for UC Surface to control the mixer is another story. That tablet will be connected via WLAN in most Cases and either operated from one of the Musicians on Stage or from a Technician sitting in the audience. There is obviously no way for these to operate an additional Laptop connected via USB.

So it is definitely a caveat for that mixers to not support multitrack recording.

Additionally, it is absolutely not plausible that enabling multitracking would make those mixers significantly more expensive. The Hardware is already there, the core of that Rack Mixers seems to be absolutely the same as the core of the Desktop Mixer Series, just lacking some physical Controllers. And those Desktop Mixers _can_ do Multitracking - so the Software for this is already there, too. There is no plausible need to extend the Rack Mixers Hardware (except maybe a faster Card reader but that won't eat much money since such readers are available widely as cheap mass poroducts)  and no plausible reason why the already existing Recording Software from the Desktop Models cannot be executed on the Rack Versions. So any higher pricing for multitrack recording is a pure political decision, absolutely nothing else.
...