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Electribe SX: file limit on Smartmedia cards
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Antimon



Joined: Jan 18, 2005
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PostPosted: Sun Feb 05, 2006 8:07 am    Post subject: Electribe SX: file limit on Smartmedia cards Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

Hello!

I recently bought myself a Korg Electribe SX. It uses large Smartmedia cards to store stuff like samples and patterns. I figured it would be nice to fill up a 128 Mb card with lots of drum samples and other weird sounds that I've generated - but I ran into problems.

I have a little multicard reader from Sandisk that I plug my card into, and use with Windows 2000. When I drag a bunch of samples to the disk icon, it fills up with perhaps 20 Mb of data (this varies from time to time) and then says "Disk full". When I check the disk it says "100 Mb free space", so I should be able to fit in more files...

I'm thinking it might have something to do with the FAT filesystem, because if I reformat the card with FAT32 or NTFS, I can store more on it. Sadly the Electribe won't recognize the card if it is formatted to anything else than FAT.

Does anyone have any insights? Could there be something wrong with my reader, or is this the way it works with FAT? Anything I can do? I've seen Smartmedia being used in other music gear, so if that's the issue other people should have run into this, but I couldn't find anything useful on the web.

Cheers,

Stefan
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blue hell
Site Admin


Joined: Apr 03, 2004
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PostPosted: Sun Feb 05, 2006 9:08 am    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

Maybe http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_Allocation_Table helps ?

Some of my own thoughs about it are :

The 20 MB max you have suggests FAT12, which is really odd and old, and I don't believe that to be the case. The windows format FAT option should be FAT16.

Maybe you could experiment with explicitely seting the record (allocation unit) size. When in a DOS box/Console window you could type "format /?" to see the options for that.

Maybe only sectors are supported that are equal in size to the flash pages of the actual memory chips. This could be as low 128 bytes, but it varies with the memory device(s) used. Can't quickly find any refs for that though.

_________________
Jan
also .. could someone please turn down the thermostat a bit.
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deknow



Joined: Sep 15, 2004
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PostPosted: Sun Feb 05, 2006 10:52 am    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

perhaps try to format the card in the electribe (in case you haven't done this).

deknow
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Antimon



Joined: Jan 18, 2005
Posts: 4145
Location: Sweden
Audio files: 371
G2 patch files: 100

PostPosted: Sun Feb 05, 2006 3:16 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

Thanks for the tips - I had looked at the wikipedia entry already, but didn't notice the FAT12 bit (it's a big page, didn't know what I was looking for).

Format /? gives me the choice between FAT, FAT32 and NTFS. I've tried using FAT with a cluster size of 2048, which I think should be OK, but with the same result. If I use few large files instead of many small, I can fill the card.

Formatting with the Electribe gives the same result as formatting to FAT in Windows. Sad

/Stefan
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