Backing Up Songs to CD

You've put a long of hard work into your recording, editing, mixing, and mastering, so be sure to make regular backups . When you back up your song to CD, you are backing up all of your audio and the VS internal data surrounding that song. This internal data includes things such as locators, scenes, markers, Automix data, track parameter and effect settings, and Undo history.

Select Your Part

When you choose to back up a song to CD, you can only back up songs that are in the currently selected partition. When you choose to recover a song from CD, you can only recover the currently selected partition. Before you perform a backup or recover, make sure you have first selected the proper partition. Use the Drive Select function within the System menu to change partitions.

Backups can only be made of songs that reside on the internal hard drive. If you are using external SCSI hard drives , you'll first need to copy songs back to the internal hard drive before you can back them up. During the backup process, you can choose to back up either one song or all songs within a partition. This means if you had three songs on a particular partition, you could not back up Song 1 and Song 3 in a single step. Also, the backup works on a partition level, so there isn't any way to back up all songs in all partitions in a single step.

When you create a backup, the CD is automatically finalized as part of the backup procedure. Additionally, since the backup contains your audio and the internal data in a proprietary format, this CD is not playable on a CD player, and the data cannot be read on a computer.

To perform the backup, press the SONG Edit Condition button multiple times until you see SNG CD-R Backup? and then press YES. The VS will search for the SCSI CD burner, and it will briefly show some information about the CD burner in the display. Now you can choose which song to back up by using the jogwheel. If you want to back up all songs, turn the jogwheel counterclockwise until you see CDR Bak = All Song xxx, where xxx represents the total number of songs in the current partition. Figure 7.3 shows the display screen when selecting one song versus selecting all songs.

Figure 7.3. When performing a backup, you can select one song or all songs

At this point, if you press the YES button, the backup will begin. However, there are two additional settings that you can control, and these are only available if you press the parameter button after selecting the song to back up. The first setting is the Verify option, and the default is ON. If you set Verify = ON, the VS will back up the song data to CD and then compare the backup version to the original version. If Verify finds any differences, you will receive a warning message, and you should perform the backup again. Using Verify will increase the amount of time it takes to perform the backup function. The next setting is the write speed, and the default is 1x. Changing this to 4x is a good idea, as the backup process will be faster. However, if your song data is fragmented across the hard drive, the VS may not be able to send data to the burner fast enough. This can result in a Function Failed message. If your backups fail when writing at 4x speed, try reducing the write speed to 2x.

If the amount of song data to back up is more than what will fit on a single CD, the VS will span the backup across multiple CDs.

The Backup Shuffle

When you execute a backup, the VS first compares the free space on the CD to the amount of song data to back up. If the song data is greater than the amount of space on the CD, the VS will prompt you to Insert Disc 2. Here's a tip: If you are using CDs with the same amount of available space, such as 700MB, just reinsert the exact same CD. During this process, nothing is being written to the CDs; the VS is just determining how many CDs will be required to back up the song data. Once that is done, it will prompt you to Insert Disc 1, and now it will begin writing the backup data to the CD.