Brettington Frothingslosh I love your vids. They bring back a lot of memories for me. I just stumbled across one where you were talking about 4 track recording. I had one and then I stepped to a Roland VS-840 that also recorded to Zip disks.
I remember selling these at the music store back in my college days around 2000. They were based on Roland's COSM and VS recording studio technology and aimed mainly for guitarists because of the high-Z inputs and the fact that it defaults to guitar effects when booting up. It also incorporates the virtual track system from Roland giving you "64 tracks" which is just a fancy digital way of ping-ponging your recording. You could also make your recordings compatible with the VS studios from Roland too, which enabled you to bring your recorded stuff along if you wanted to upgrade. All in all it was a very affordable product for the home recording enthusiast and an entry level approach if you weren't able to jump into the VS range.
I have a Roland BR-80 that I use for recording my guitar riffs ideas(acts as an amp sim too and it can even be used as a USB interface for a pc DAW) and the amp sim section is clearly labeled "COSM", I had no idea that name went way back! the amp sims on the BR-80 are very nice in my opinion, and it's D.I section and ADC are totally decent as well. I love using this thing, obviously using a good standalone USB interface and a full-fledged DAW on pc and VST plugins is better, but for recording my riffs without the need of an amp an multitracking/writing songs either at home or ON THE GO(huge advantage here), the BR-80 suits my needs just fine, despite being a bit older machine at this point (I don't think I've ever seen someone use this type of machine, haha. looks like it got superseeded by other products and techniques)
Regarding the CPU, I'd bet it's a Hitachi SH-2 based 32-bit RISC CPU (probably a HD7034 series). I have a few Roland service manuals for synths released in the same timeframe and they use that CPU. I suspect Roland/Boss would have used that CPU in as many products as possible to reduce sourcing costs. EDIT: As @Sephiroth Kefka pointed out in the below replies, the HD7034 is an SH-1, not an SH-2. Sorry for the confusion.
Yeah, there's no way it would be a PowerPC CPU, complete overkill for a device like this and far too expensive. These sort of devices in the 90s tended to have very basic CPUs in concert with DSP chips.
Back in the day, I put together a ( Teac 8 T cassette, mixer, compressor, lexicon,drum machine etc.) home studio. About 10 years later returning to the same store I asked about upgrading possibilities, nice man pointed at the newly arrived BR8 and said get rid of your stuff and buy that. I did. Simple, fast, effective, portable with an amazing sound. It still is. I just love the " real " faders.
I own this and it's an integral part of my live studio setup even to this day. Note that you can change out the Zip100 drive with a Zip250 and even in theory a Zip650 drive for longer recording times. You can also mix down the tracks to virtual tracks (for a total of 64 tracks). To get the tracks out onto a PC, use the Wave Converter utility to convert the recorded tracks to .wav format for use.
Upon investigation, the BR-8 is similar to the Roland VS-840 (BOSS = Roland), and I found a page saying it uses RDAC compression (Roland Digital Audio Compression). So it's Roland's own proprietary compression.
In my mind, so much of what is now considered 'vintage' can't be more than maybe ten years old. My first PC? Now vintage. My first laptop computer? Vintage. My first game console? Viiiiintage. Then I look at the calendar and realize "Oh, that was 20 years ago. Gee, what happened?" Now I need a drink.
oh god 20 years ago. soon the year 2000 will be 20 years ago. god the playstation 2 will be 2 decades old. man I gotta prepare for the 20th anniversary of the ps2
Zip disks were the bomb. It's a shame Iomega never licensed drive manufacturing to other companies, or else the format might have survived longer, and with a better selection of modern USB drives.
themaritimeman I heard a story where a company released a product with intention to keep it exclusive, but other companies still managed to copy the technology and ended up outdoing the original company.
eh, I doubt it. iomega was a solution to very few people's problems. Only businesses basically. At home, they had little use. Remember you could store dozens of Word docs in a single floppy... and your family album was literally an album, no need to backup anything. That, and the fact that CD-R was affordable in 1998 and commonplace by 2002, meant they didn't have anything to give you. And businesses stopped using floppies for data exchange: you could mail or FTP reasonably large files over broadband. For even larger stuff, they resorted to CD-Rs which were universal.
7 ปีที่แล้ว +7
They sucked. These people are emotionally attached to such garbage.
lol, you mad bro? In all seriousness, sorry you had a bad experience with them, but I know that wasn't the case for everyone. They're still popular in the vintage computing community - not for nostalgia, but because they're so damn useful for moving large amounts of data to vintage computers. I've got two parallel/SCSI drives that I use on my vintage PCs and Macs, and a couple of PCs with an IDE drive built in, and they all work great.
@goatstaog; themaritimeman is right. *You* had a bad experience with them. I never did. As he said, they're useful for moving large amounts of data to vintage computers, as long as you have one that hasn't developed the Click of Death. The Zip drive *was* prone to developing misaligned heads, for various reasons. Dust inside the Zip disks or dirty heads caused by oxide build-up could misalign the heads. Magnetic fields could also cause the drive heads to become misaligned, as the drives were not internally shielded from external magnetic fields. The heads caused the data on the cartridge to become misaligned, rendering it unreadable. The Zip disks also wore out, grew defects, or otherwise lost all four 'Z tracks'. If all four redundant 'Z tracks' were lost, the disk was unusable, since retail drives are unable to low-level format the disks. With a malfunctioning drive or disk, the drive heads tried to read the Zip disk, but could not find a good Z track or hit a bad spot during a read operation. As part of the drive's retry program, the controller would quickly snap the head arm back into the drive and out again, producing a specific number of 'clicks'. This happens each time a data request fails: the drive parks the heads to calibrate them and presumably clean them. Parking and relaunching continued until the data had been read or a set number of attempts had been reached. Another problem was that some asshole in the manufacturing department decided to cut costs by not including the doughnut-shaped foam washer at the end of the steel bearing the actuator slid on. If the drive had its power removed inadvertently by being unplugged or power outage, the read/write heads were pulled off the disk by a power-loss circuit. This was to prevent damage to the disk by the heads being left on the media. When the actuator was removed in this manner, it slammed to a stop at the end of its travel. Without that foam washer to absorb the impact, if you ever had a power failure while the Zip drive was in operation... well, you can guess what happened. This omission was discovered by the drive's original designers and the washer was put back into the design, and new Zip drives did not experience this click of death. (Hard drives have a similar phenomenon: The head actuator may click or knock as the drive repetitively tries to recover from one or more errors. These sounds can be heard as the heads load or unload, or they can be the sounds of the actuator striking a stop, or both. The click of death may indicate that the hard drive has crashed or failed.)
I didn't know they made a ZIP disk model, that is interesting. I had the BR-1180, which had a built in 40GB hard drive and an onboard CD burner. I knew that thing inside and out, and took on a hugely ambitious project where I recorded an entire album as one song because that was the only way I could get the songs to segue into each other. I used that thing so much the Undo button practically stopped working, so I had to be careful about punching in or I'd erase something I didn't want to. I was so excited to bring that thing home after I bought it. I still have it, and I'm thinking of posting a video about how I put that album together because it is quite unusual.
To quibble, HDs were quite a lot bigger than 100MB in 1999. I built a PII PC in 1998 and used a 4.3GB HD as boot drive (it came out of my 486) and had a 17GB data drive, which was top of the range then (it was for using with Cubase). By early 2002 I was building another PC with 60GB for C: and dual 60GBs for data (as a RAID 1 pair, mirrored). Even the first HD I had for my 486, circa 1995, was 360MB and that was very small even then (it was built on a budget).
I was given one of these the other year and I use it as an effects processor for my guitars. I pipe the output into a mixer which I then pipe into my laptop for music production. Some of the guitar effects still sound incredible even today.
I made an entire album back in 2000 with a rapper using this. Then I mastered each song "live" through an old 70's analog board stereo then into a CD recorder. Ah those were the days 😅
I've been more or less binge watching this channel since discovering it the other day. I have to say that one of the things I appreciate most is that you open everything up and show us the insides.
Even if it says its 24 Bit it isn't. you can import a .vr8 file into audacity as a RAW signed, 16 bit pcm, little-endian, 44.1kHz file and it will work while 24bit will fail.
Maybe the A/D chips were 24 bit, while recorded data was converted to 16 bit. Cool trick to fool the customers, since price difference between 16 and 24 bit ADC chips wasn't that big in the late 90s.
Well, recording to 16bit from a 24bit source will be of slightly higher quality, similar to outputting 4K to a 1080P display. But, is it really noticeable? Eh.... that really depends on the purpose. Likely not.
I've got a Boss BR-8. I still use it and the sound quality is better than it has any right to be! I've used it with several bands I've been in as well as doing my own stuff at home. When I found out the situation regarding available recording time I started to think the purchase of this item may have been a mistake but in practice it's never been a problem. The other thing is how quickly you outgrow 8 tracks. This was never a problem either because you can bounce the tracks down without appreciable loss of sound quality. I did a mixdown once that contained 22 tracks and it all came together more or less beautifully. These machines are much better than they appear at first glance. One last thing, the 100MB drive in one of these can be replaced with a 250MB drive giving much increased recording time. I haven't done that to mine yet but may do. I wondered if a hard disk could be fitted instead (the thought of a 1TB drive is quite appealing) but on doing some research I discovered it doesn't work for whatever reason and it actually destroys the whole machine! So I won't be trying that... Great vid about an item I see as something of an unsung hero in the world of broke musicians in bands you'll never hear of...
I once owned one of these back around 2001. Main reason I picked it was convenience, 8 tacks (far better than the old 4 track cassette) and zip disk feature which my PC at the time had. I always used the zip on the computer as data storage I could clear the disks and reuse them (had no idea boss had pc software wav conversion would have saved me so much time) I recorded the unit line in to the computer as a recorded wav and later burned it to an external CD/R/W so i could listen to the personal albums in the car or home stereo with clear satisfying results. I ended up selling it when I moved to a different town and regretted for a long time. Good simple yet versatile machine!
I still have my Roland B-R 8 and still use it! I have been slowly transferring consolidated tracks from songs I had recorded on my dip discs and remixing them on the computer. 23 years old and still runs fine.
The BR8 was actually intended as a "sketchpad" if you will for guitarists. You could multi track guitar parts and get some darn good pre production done before booking studio time at a commercial facility. I recorded audio with one it worked really good. It has onboard effects and a great function for marking points in the recording so you can jump to any part in the composition without the need for excessive fast forwarding and rewinding. The portability and simple interface make this ideal for modern musicians.
iomega tried to stay relevant but they were ultimately eaten alive by CD-R and later DVD-R. I knew very few people with Zip drives... mostly professionals for whom 1.44MB wasn't enough. I didn't know anyone with LS120 tho... and those were often bundled with some PCs.
Oh man, my band bought one of these back in 2002 when we were sophomores in high school. Brings back a lot of memories. I also live in PA; I wonder what the odds are that ours ended up changing hands and eventually got sent to you. Probably not high, but still neat.
Well, you could always use fewer tracks to get the recording time higher. And it does have a built-in bounce feature to combine tracks, which should be lossless on this machine. (I meant to mention that in the video, but forgot)
Hi. Thank you for showing us another completely unknown stuff. Looks like the ZIP drive is a SCSI flavor ? Very difficult to find one in a good condition. At the time this rig was built, I was working in a computer shop and one of my customer brought a 16 tracks recorder (I think it was a Tektronix) and I changed the hard drive in it. I also still own a pack of ZIP250 drives and disks ; I use them for transfering datas to my 2 old rigs : A Pentium III with a voodoo3 and and AWE32 running win98, and a first-generation pentium 4 with rambus running windows me.
We had one of those when I was in high school. We had a class where we wrote, performed and recorded 2 or 3 songs, put them on a CD, marketed it, and sold it.
My musician brother of mine had one of these from 2000 to around 2008 and it was a great little machine. Recorded several albums on it - one of which I mixed.
I have recorded most of my material on this very unique piece of gear. You can hear and see what was used to record the tracks in the additional info for each. hope you dig. Thanks for posting this BR 8 history lesson : soundcloud.com/lofihigh
Not *all* of them. Keep them away from external magnetic fields, and make sure yours is one of the ones *with* the foam washer at the end of the actuator's travel zone. (Some idiot in manufacturing thought that removing the washer would make a great cost-saving measure, but all it did was increase the odds that the drive would be damaged if there was ever a power failure.) Mine still works fine, and I've had it for 20 years.
I had one that worked just fine for me, until one of my roommates threw it in the closet for a while, and when I dug it back out.. Well, you can already guess.
The click of death is a pretty exaggerated failure mode. Full of myth and mystery. Not all Iomega drives are susceptible to it. The older ones are especially resistant. Mind you I backed all my stuff of of my zips as soon as I heard tell rumors of the dread click. I never suffered a failure though.
special for those who devote their time composing tunes for floppy drives, yes, they use the mechanicals inside floppy drives to play music in clicks.... and you thought the pc speaker was the lowest way to listen to music...
Hi there and THANK YOU for your videos. I bought this BR-8 back in 2000 at Sam Ash. It was roughly $700 and they would throw in a carrying case, however, at the time, Sam Ash had a hard time keeping or getting stock on zip disc, so circuit city or guitar center was the was where I would get em. There is one feature that this has that you did not cover, and that is the VIRTUAL tracks. Each track has 8 virtual tracks so you can actually keep different ideas/arrangements on each track having a total of 64! Another accessory that was/is available is the foot switch which I would use to punch in and out when recording.... I still own mine. You can actually remove the 100mb Zip drive and replace it with a 250mb which was amazing back then (the jazz drive was KING back then by having the capability of 1.2GB of storage) I really really enjoy your video and I've learned so much from them. Thank you for sharing your genius with us. Now I will buy one of yout
What interface does the ZIP drive use? is it a floppy or IDE header? maybe you could look at swapping it for a card reader of some kind? Just a thought
My guitar instructor had one of these in 1999, it was sooooo expensive, but soooo good. I have several songs we recorded on it. Great trip down memory lane!
@Richard Jones maybe you have a modified one! There is some info circulating that you can replace the ZIP drive with an SD card Reader. Unfortunately i haven't been able to get more info. Maybe if you take some photos of your machine... or open it up and show us, you will be making a HUGE contribution to the internet. Please do!
I suppose If instead zip drive you install IDE/SCSI to CF/SD adapter, than you can put flash card of 2,4 or more gigabytes, and get more recording time.
ZIP is always hooked on some HDD interface. In the present case, I do not know whether it's IDE or SCSI disk but they support at least 1 gigabyte drive unless it is deliberately limited to 100 mb. Roland-Boss are subsidiaries and some of the Roland products from that year supports over 1 gigabyte hdd on SCSI zip cable.
I looked at doing this with my unit a while back and from the information I found the firmware for this version wasn't compatible with card readers(didn't find any actual reasons just that it wasn't.) The next model apparently was although even then it apparently required a particular brand card reader. Maybe they where still using older chipsets/firmware for this release. Oh, and no hard limiting on size. They will take 250MB drive without any problems, including using 250MB disks to full capacity.
I should probably clarify that the info I was looking at was relating to Muti-card readers and SD cards. I assume the issues were with recognising the muliple drives in the multi-card readers. This was also simply reports from people who had tries and failed. I didn't have any card readers around at the time to try it myself.
You are correct. There was one particular SD card adapter that was compatible - it was discussed on the yahoo br-8 group. I managed to get hold of one, and replaced the zip drive with it. IIRC correctly it could not recognise more than 512meg cards though (ie it took the card but you could never get more than 512m space)
Hey, 8bit Keys, I’ve started a channel because you inspired me to do it, old tech is pretty much what i like the most interesting thing in my life right now, but i didn’t began with tech video, i’ve done french review of video games, well all i want to say is:thank you for giving me your passion :)
Radio stations used to refuse playing almost any song longer than about 3 minutes. That set the standard for almost every modern composition, even if they never made it outside the rehearsal garage.
back in 2000, I worked for a small graphical services company and many customers sent us packs of 6 zip catridges to burn into 1 CD so they can have their projects backed up in read only optical discs and re-use the zips in their everyday projects
I used to us a Roland vs840. It bridged the gad between the 4track I used to use to the digital world. It still works today although zip discs were not very reliable. Thanks for sharing!
I had a zipdrive borrowed for a while somewhere around the end of 1990s. I remember we had the 250MB disks already. I don't even remember what we used it for but it was very cool to have a magnetic rewritable medium with such a high capacity back then (there were still 1,44MB floppies common back then).
I started watching your sister channel, and found these videos recently... As a tech person who also makes music, I must say that I'm absolutely in love with your work, and want to thank you for making these videos!
I still have one. I paid 500 quid for it in 1999. It sounded just as good as CD and MD 8 tracks of the time. The BR8 was a BOSS branded cut down version of the Roland digital portable 8 tracks. The drum machine feature was unique and very handy when thinking about adding live drums to the mix last. It also had an optical connection for mastering to DAT etc.
Great video, I used to have a SCSI ZIP drive that I used with my Akai sampler back in the day. I always wanted the Roland VS-880 multi-track recorder, that had an Iomega drive built in - but that was the 90's!!
That is a pretty neat recorder. I have owned several multi-track recorders over the years, but have been out of recording for a long time and have no idea what is used today. I purchased an Akai hard disc based recorder back in 2001 which is the most advanced recorder I've ever used. I think I remember spending something like 499.99 to get the SCSI CD burner drive for it. I thought it was amazing to burn to CD on the same unit. I have also owned a Yamaha 4 track recorder that used MiniDisc data as its medium.
I remember buying one of these brand new when they first hit the market. I had been recording with a Yamaha 4 track cassette recorder and getting to go digital was such a treat for me then. This SUCKER cost me$850 band new in 1999!!! I wouldn't even dream of paying that for a top of the line laptop today! But!? Look at the selection we had now compared to back then? As a recording musician in 1999? This was A MUST HAVE!!! Now that I work with Studio one 4 I still think about where I started from and looking at all the free software they just toss in with new and free versions of studio one when it gets updated and I think to myself-I would have given my left nut to have just these few new features alone in my Studio one 4 software. We always should remind ourselves where we started with what we get to use so freely today!? I'm so thankful to be alive and well in this year of our Lord 2020!!!
It is similar to a recording studio That I owned a couple of years ago. It was the Zoom MRS-802, from around 2003, it had a CD-RW writer and an internal standard Hard Disk IDE on it. Also It had 8 separate tracks, but you can store your songs directly on CD, or hard drive. Also the hard drive was used for storing the samples of the internal drum machine, which has a very good sound, and some demo songs.
I briefly owned this unit but didn't like it so I immediately sold it, and replaced it with a Yamaha Multitrack MD Minidisc Recorder or MD8, this unit was just as easy to use as my previously owned Analog 8 Track which recorded to cassette tapes, and I recorded a lot on that machine and I still have most of the songs and proud of about 30, the rest were simple scratch recordings/ just goofing around. The quality was excellent. All of my recordings are original songs and I used a combination of guitars, bass, keyboards and an external Roland R70 drum machine, (which you should review by the way because that unit still sounds great, even by today's standards) Anyway, great video thanks.
For those who doesn't know, ZIP discs were generally the go-to for backing up entire computers back in the day. As mentioned in this video, hard drives were generally not much larger than that and with some compression, you could even fit two hard drives on a single disc. The discs were cheap enough, but the drives could cost a fortune.
An interesting watch! I still use my BOSS BR-600 from 8-9 years back for all of my jamming/recording needs. Never saw any reason to upgrade since it still just works and has everything I need.
We used zip 100 disks as late as 2004/2005 in highschool for an new advanced media academy (usb thumbdrives eventually became affordable). Unfortunately, we had a 20-30% fail rate on the zip drives; which taught us to backup and many of us ended up hauling external harddrives and writing cd-rw's. But if we were in a hurry or didn't have any other option; zip-disk it was. I saved the output of many photoshop, illustrator, premiere (the original), and after effects projects on zip disks. Ah, memories.
This was my first digital workstation. I started on cassette based stations, but this was the first I personally owned. Nice little piece of kit for it's day.
It's a fascinating device from something of a transition period. Before USB and SD cards started to dominate everything. I still have a ZIP drive on the grounds that being able to read obsolete storage media is quite useful. That-s the same reason I still own a VHS recorder and 3.5 and 5.25 inch floppy drives even though I don't have the drives installed in anything. They're around just in case I need them.
A close friend of mine who is a graphics artist stored most of her projects (photoshop and other similar programs) on a ZIP disk during that time frame as well. They were pretty popular during the time as I recall.
Just broke mine out and dusted it off. I had to relearn everything. It's quite a complex machine with many capabilities. The internal effects and drum tracks are nice, or I sometimes mic my amps and use a live sound for the input (going through a pre-mixer first). The BR8 is still quite impressive for its age. I considered buying a new digital studio, but after reading reviews and spec sheets, I realized that this old BR8 is just as capable as many of the latest machines, with the exception of the storage media of course. I don't mind using ZIP discs - I have lots of them and a couple of drives. So, I'm happy to hang onto my money and work with what I have.
Back in 1988 (yes 1988) I bought a 4 track recorder card for the Mac IIcx. It could record 4 tracks to the HDD at 16bit\44Mhz. The limitation at that time was HDD space. The largest HDDs were about 100mb, costing several hundred each. Professional Studios might have 1GB HDDs costing thousands per HDD.
I had one of these. It was so much fun to work with. Very intuitive. Easy to find your way around. But I always filled the zip disc far too quickly. Then I got the Roland VS-890 which was probably the best at the time but so much more complicated to work with and I only ever figured out about 30% of the features.
I bought one of these brand new back in the day and recorded an entire album on it. I still use the BR-8 to this day in combination with a USB ZIP drive for transferring tracks to my PC. It's a great machine and pretty affordable.
WOW ! I have a BR-532, I got when I was 12, and I think It may have been border lining "old" back then haha This is great, I love the history of these old digital units
on the fly multitrack recording put alot of strain on the zip drives more than anything else so this was a good way to get a drive already known to be temperamental to fail even quicker, still wasnt much else they could have used to bring it to the market back in 1999. also the boss sp 808 groove sampler used zip disk multitrack recording thats a very nice peice of equipment.
In 1999, I was recording to a Macintosh computer's hard disk. It was cheaper than buying a BR-8 or buying a DAT machine for me at the time. Thank you for Cubase!
I remember when my elementary school adopted the use of zip disks. They use to lock up the hardware (standalone reader & disks) because they were so expensive at the time. I don't remember them being around for all that long though, it seems right around that same time CD's were taking off pretty rapidly. I also remember that same elementary school using word processing machines that were portable, like a laptop (but flat with a very small 2"x10" screen) that they also locked up in a special cart. we had to check them out when we would use them and we got yelled at if we didn't carry them with both hands, lol. Oh, now that I think of it, and after doing a quick google search, the word processor was the alpha smart pro.
I still have the BR-8 I purchased brand new in 2000. The zip disk was for recording only. Not storage. I used a fiber optic cable from the BR-8 to my CD burner and recorded after I had my mix right on the BR-8. The issue today is finding Zip disks to record on.
Here is a cool trick I learned off of recordologies channel I believe: If you are curious about discrete circuits and logic ICs etc but don't want to tair up a cool piece of equipment you can look up the FCC ID for the appliance and there should be internal shots of the appliance on that database for you to look at complete with schematics and everything.
What's great is that it does have a line out, MIDI out. So you can export those sounds to a DAW via interface. So it's still has options to be useful, though the workflow may be more convoluted.
Interesting blast from the past for me as, my friend had one of these and recorded 3 albums with it. For each one, he brought it over to mine to mix those 3 albums. However... this is the first time I've seen the Zoom wav converter utility. Soooo... this means we spent loads of time re-recording it onto my daw. 3 albums... The only saving grace was, I connected it up via the coaxial digital output, so, there's that, I guess.
It's getting much more attention than it was sitting boxed up in my basement. Glad it found a new life :)
Brettington Frothingslosh I love your vids. They bring back a lot of memories for me. I just stumbled across one where you were talking about 4 track recording. I had one and then I stepped to a Roland VS-840 that also recorded to Zip disks.
2 year later I get the feeling it's now sitting in box in 8 bit guy's house.
Mayson Storm What happened to them?
@@maysonstorm4956 he dosnt have any vids
@@justanotheryoutubechannel I actually don't remember what happened to the Tascam 4-Track (this was the mid-late 90s) but I still have the Roland.
I remember selling these at the music store back in my college days around 2000. They were based on Roland's COSM and VS recording studio technology and aimed mainly for guitarists because of the high-Z inputs and the fact that it defaults to guitar effects when booting up. It also incorporates the virtual track system from Roland giving you "64 tracks" which is just a fancy digital way of ping-ponging your recording. You could also make your recordings compatible with the VS studios from Roland too, which enabled you to bring your recorded stuff along if you wanted to upgrade.
All in all it was a very affordable product for the home recording enthusiast and an entry level approach if you weren't able to jump into the VS range.
I have a Roland BR-80 that I use for recording my guitar riffs ideas(acts as an amp sim too and it can even be used as a USB interface for a pc DAW) and the amp sim section is clearly labeled "COSM", I had no idea that name went way back! the amp sims on the BR-80 are very nice in my opinion, and it's D.I section and ADC are totally decent as well. I love using this thing, obviously using a good standalone USB interface and a full-fledged DAW on pc and VST plugins is better, but for recording my riffs without the need of an amp an multitracking/writing songs either at home or ON THE GO(huge advantage here), the BR-80 suits my needs just fine, despite being a bit older machine at this point (I don't think I've ever seen someone use this type of machine, haha. looks like it got superseeded by other products and techniques)
Hahaha, right on point!!! I just now read your comment (after I just touched on the virtual tracks). 😂
Regarding the CPU, I'd bet it's a Hitachi SH-2 based 32-bit RISC CPU (probably a HD7034 series). I have a few Roland service manuals for synths released in the same timeframe and they use that CPU. I suspect Roland/Boss would have used that CPU in as many products as possible to reduce sourcing costs.
EDIT: As @Sephiroth Kefka pointed out in the below replies, the HD7034 is an SH-1, not an SH-2. Sorry for the confusion.
So much for 8-bit then *rimshot*
+JackstandJohnny wtf?
Yeah, there's no way it would be a PowerPC CPU, complete overkill for a device like this and far too expensive. These sort of devices in the 90s tended to have very basic CPUs in concert with DSP chips.
JackstandJohnny What is your damage little boy?
Nathan S I
Back in the day, I put together a ( Teac 8 T cassette, mixer, compressor, lexicon,drum machine etc.) home studio. About 10 years later returning to the same store I asked about upgrading possibilities, nice man pointed at the newly arrived BR8 and said get rid of your stuff and buy that. I did. Simple, fast, effective, portable with an amazing sound. It still is. I just love the " real " faders.
I own this and it's an integral part of my live studio setup even to this day. Note that you can change out the Zip100 drive with a Zip250 and even in theory a Zip650 drive for longer recording times. You can also mix down the tracks to virtual tracks (for a total of 64 tracks). To get the tracks out onto a PC, use the Wave Converter utility to convert the recorded tracks to .wav format for use.
So the firmware will support a 250 MB version of the ZIP drive?
8-Bit Keys I'm curious of this too. I have one of these machines I still use today!
250MB drive works without any problems.
If it ever dies, you could put a PATA CF card reader in its place.
Silly that you have to go through such steps to convert it to a useable format. And those zip drives...so goddawfully slow.
Upon investigation, the BR-8 is similar to the Roland VS-840 (BOSS = Roland), and I found a page saying it uses RDAC compression (Roland Digital Audio Compression). So it's Roland's own proprietary compression.
Yes and it's obviously not a lossless format. The numbers just don't add up.
In my mind, so much of what is now considered 'vintage' can't be more than maybe ten years old.
My first PC? Now vintage.
My first laptop computer? Vintage.
My first game console? Viiiiintage.
Then I look at the calendar and realize "Oh, that was 20 years ago. Gee, what happened?"
Now I need a drink.
Tim Berghoff sarcastically that happens as soon as it leaves best buy
oh god 20 years ago. soon the year 2000 will be 20 years ago.
god the playstation 2 will be 2 decades old. man I gotta prepare for the 20th anniversary of the ps2
I thought 35 years made something vintage.
Tim Berghoff Tell me about it mate.
Nothing is old!
...unless it's from the 60s. Let's just pretend the 60s never happend.
Zip disks were the bomb. It's a shame Iomega never licensed drive manufacturing to other companies, or else the format might have survived longer, and with a better selection of modern USB drives.
themaritimeman
I heard a story where a company released a product with intention to keep it exclusive, but other companies still managed to copy the technology and ended up outdoing the original company.
eh, I doubt it. iomega was a solution to very few people's problems. Only businesses basically. At home, they had little use. Remember you could store dozens of Word docs in a single floppy... and your family album was literally an album, no need to backup anything. That, and the fact that CD-R was affordable in 1998 and commonplace by 2002, meant they didn't have anything to give you. And businesses stopped using floppies for data exchange: you could mail or FTP reasonably large files over broadband. For even larger stuff, they resorted to CD-Rs which were universal.
They sucked. These people are emotionally attached to such garbage.
lol, you mad bro? In all seriousness, sorry you had a bad experience with them, but I know that wasn't the case for everyone. They're still popular in the vintage computing community - not for nostalgia, but because they're so damn useful for moving large amounts of data to vintage computers. I've got two parallel/SCSI drives that I use on my vintage PCs and Macs, and a couple of PCs with an IDE drive built in, and they all work great.
@goatstaog;
themaritimeman is right. *You* had a bad experience with them. I never did. As he said, they're useful for moving large amounts of data to vintage computers, as long as you have one that hasn't developed the Click of Death.
The Zip drive *was* prone to developing misaligned heads, for various reasons. Dust inside the Zip disks or dirty heads caused by oxide build-up could misalign the heads. Magnetic fields could also cause the drive heads to become misaligned, as the drives were not internally shielded from external magnetic fields. The heads caused the data on the cartridge to become misaligned, rendering it unreadable. The Zip disks also wore out, grew defects, or otherwise lost all four 'Z tracks'. If all four redundant 'Z tracks' were lost, the disk was unusable, since retail drives are unable to low-level format the disks.
With a malfunctioning drive or disk, the drive heads tried to read the Zip disk, but could not find a good Z track or hit a bad spot during a read operation. As part of the drive's retry program, the controller would quickly snap the head arm back into the drive and out again, producing a specific number of 'clicks'. This happens each time a data request fails: the drive parks the heads to calibrate them and presumably clean them. Parking and relaunching continued until the data had been read or a set number of attempts had been reached.
Another problem was that some asshole in the manufacturing department decided to cut costs by not including the doughnut-shaped foam washer at the end of the steel bearing the actuator slid on. If the drive had its power removed inadvertently by being unplugged or power outage, the read/write heads were pulled off the disk by a power-loss circuit. This was to prevent damage to the disk by the heads being left on the media. When the actuator was removed in this manner, it slammed to a stop at the end of its travel. Without that foam washer to absorb the impact, if you ever had a power failure while the Zip drive was in operation... well, you can guess what happened. This omission was discovered by the drive's original designers and the washer was put back into the design, and new Zip drives did not experience this click of death.
(Hard drives have a similar phenomenon: The head actuator may click or knock as the drive repetitively tries to recover from one or more errors. These sounds can be heard as the heads load or unload, or they can be the sounds of the actuator striking a stop, or both. The click of death may indicate that the hard drive has crashed or failed.)
You know, this video was pretty... GR-8.
Memer Jones coooooool ^^
*grabs a fish and slaps you with it*
Dem Shadowwolf *uses brick break*
... Can't think of a response.
Memer Jones.
Am I the only one that gets the GR-8 part?
I didn't know they made a ZIP disk model, that is interesting.
I had the BR-1180, which had a built in 40GB hard drive and an onboard CD burner. I knew that thing inside and out, and took on a hugely ambitious project where I recorded an entire album as one song because that was the only way I could get the songs to segue into each other. I used that thing so much the Undo button practically stopped working, so I had to be careful about punching in or I'd erase something I didn't want to.
I was so excited to bring that thing home after I bought it. I still have it, and I'm thinking of posting a video about how I put that album together because it is quite unusual.
Landon Balk
Is segue pronounced like seg-way?
conduit122 I believe so
Landon Balk I'd like to hear the track that came out of that... Would be nice to hear...
Can't seem to post a link, but you can find the complete album on TH-cam (or anywhere really) it's called Death of the American Dream.
Landon Balk I have the same unit and wanted to know where do I find the metronome?
To quibble, HDs were quite a lot bigger than 100MB in 1999. I built a PII PC in 1998 and used a 4.3GB HD as boot drive (it came out of my 486) and had a 17GB data drive, which was top of the range then (it was for using with Cubase). By early 2002 I was building another PC with 60GB for C: and dual 60GBs for data (as a RAID 1 pair, mirrored).
Even the first HD I had for my 486, circa 1995, was 360MB and that was very small even then (it was built on a budget).
I'm pretty sure my Apple Powerbook from 1997 or so had a 1 GB stock drive in it, and I'm pretty sure I got the lowest-end model for the time.
I was given one of these the other year and I use it as an effects processor for my guitars. I pipe the output into a mixer which I then pipe into my laptop for music production. Some of the guitar effects still sound incredible even today.
I made an entire album back in 2000 with a rapper using this.
Then I mastered each song "live" through an old 70's analog board stereo then into a CD recorder.
Ah those were the days 😅
I've been more or less binge watching this channel since discovering it the other day. I have to say that one of the things I appreciate most is that you open everything up and show us the insides.
Even if it says its 24 Bit it isn't. you can import a .vr8 file into audacity as a RAW signed, 16 bit pcm, little-endian, 44.1kHz file and it will work while 24bit will fail.
That's interesting.
It's probably 24 bit internal processing and 16 bit output. Same fudging of figures that TV's do with the whole 240hz shite
Maybe the A/D chips were 24 bit, while recorded data was converted to 16 bit. Cool trick to fool the customers, since price difference between 16 and 24 bit ADC chips wasn't that big in the late 90s.
Well, recording to 16bit from a 24bit source will be of slightly higher quality, similar to outputting 4K to a 1080P display. But, is it really noticeable? Eh.... that really depends on the purpose. Likely not.
+theLuigiFan0007 recording to 16bit from 24bit source can also be of lower quality. It all depends on how you are doing the conversion.
I've got a Boss BR-8. I still use it and the sound quality is better than it has any right to be! I've used it with several bands I've been in as well as doing my own stuff at home. When I found out the situation regarding available recording time I started to think the purchase of this item may have been a mistake but in practice it's never been a problem.
The other thing is how quickly you outgrow 8 tracks. This was never a problem either because you can bounce the tracks down without appreciable loss of sound quality. I did a mixdown once that contained 22 tracks and it all came together more or less beautifully. These machines are much better than they appear at first glance.
One last thing, the 100MB drive in one of these can be replaced with a 250MB drive giving much increased recording time. I haven't done that to mine yet but may do. I wondered if a hard disk could be fitted instead (the thought of a 1TB drive is quite appealing) but on doing some research I discovered it doesn't work for whatever reason and it actually destroys the whole machine! So I won't be trying that...
Great vid about an item I see as something of an unsung hero in the world of broke musicians in bands you'll never hear of...
I miss bulky dedicated digital hardware like this. It just looks awesome.
I once owned one of these back around 2001. Main reason I picked it was convenience, 8 tacks (far better than the old 4 track cassette) and zip disk feature which my PC at the time had. I always used the zip on the computer as data storage I could clear the disks and reuse them (had no idea boss had pc software wav conversion would have saved me so much time) I recorded the unit line in to the computer as a recorded wav and later burned it to an external CD/R/W so i could listen to the personal albums in the car or home stereo with clear satisfying results. I ended up selling it when I moved to a different town and regretted for a long time. Good simple yet versatile machine!
"6 minutes is more than enough"
Not if your name is Genesis haha
Kurt Grosser
CAN'T YOU SEEEEEE THIS IS THE LAND OF CONFUSION
Kurt Grosser If you're telling more than six minutes then "The path is clear, though no eyes can see."
Po Kamnuandej Well the course was laid down long ago
Kurt Grosser Then it's something with men. LoL I can't remember the lyrics. Ahaha
Kurt Grosser Or really any Progressive Rock band for that matter.
Wow this is nice for me to see that my BR-8 still has good critism. Thank u so much!!!
Not sure I can watch anything with zip disks without getting flashbacks to all the data I lost... I shall try....
TheRealWinsletFan
Sorry
RIP the many drives that failed on me. Thankfully I never had anything important in the drive when they did.
CLICK CLICK CLICK
Aaaarrrrggggh!!!!!
My God the amount of data I lost off ZIP (100) and a few Jaz (1GB) drives.
I still have my Roland B-R 8 and still use it! I have been slowly transferring consolidated tracks from songs I had recorded on my dip discs and remixing them on the computer.
23 years old and still runs fine.
"It's more interesting to play with the volume sliders when it's somebody else's song" - that's what dubmasters do all the time! :)
The BR8 was actually intended as a "sketchpad" if you will for guitarists. You could multi track guitar parts and get some darn good pre production done before booking studio time at a commercial facility. I recorded audio with one it worked really good. It has onboard effects and a great function for marking points in the recording so you can jump to any part in the composition without the need for excessive fast forwarding and rewinding. The portability and simple interface make this ideal for modern musicians.
I went from using these zip disks to Jaz which were 1gb if i remember correctly. I used them with Akai samplers.
Jaz were so much better, faster and far more reliable than those horrible Zip disks.
The Jaz disks, however, cost much more than the Zip, then did little success in fact.
As best I remember them it was always the drives that seemed to fail, not so much the disks themselves. Could be wrong about that though.
iomega tried to stay relevant but they were ultimately eaten alive by CD-R and later DVD-R. I knew very few people with Zip drives... mostly professionals for whom 1.44MB wasn't enough. I didn't know anyone with LS120 tho... and those were often bundled with some PCs.
The LS120 drives were just so damn slow, and incredibly unreliable - and that is compared to the ZIP drives which were already pretty bad
Oh man, my band bought one of these back in 2002 when we were sophomores in high school. Brings back a lot of memories. I also live in PA; I wonder what the odds are that ours ended up changing hands and eventually got sent to you. Probably not high, but still neat.
That 6 minutes recording time wouldn't be enough if you would play prog rock...
Well, you could always use fewer tracks to get the recording time higher. And it does have a built-in bounce feature to combine tracks, which should be lossless on this machine. (I meant to mention that in the video, but forgot)
Hi. Thank you for showing us another completely unknown stuff. Looks like the ZIP drive is a SCSI flavor ? Very difficult to find one in a good condition. At the time this rig was built, I was working in a computer shop and one of my customer brought a 16 tracks recorder (I think it was a Tektronix) and I changed the hard drive in it. I also still own a pack of ZIP250 drives and disks ; I use them for transfering datas to my 2 old rigs : A Pentium III with a voodoo3 and and AWE32 running win98, and a first-generation pentium 4 with rambus running windows me.
8-Bit Keys A good vintage keyboard you should consider buying is the Roland E-28.
@The Amazing Engie It has a great sound bank, and the arranger was really good. I bought it new. I can't believe it's vintage now :|
let alone doom metal
the fm synthesis sounds so smooth, Im falling in love with it actually.
Interesting piece of equipment.
That should be modded to accept more modern media, such as SD cards and USB drives.
My Roland G-1000 also handles a ZIP-drive as well as the FDD. Back in the day (1998) having such versatility was really amazing
Another great video.
I hope you plan to do a ZIP Disk episode on The 8-Bit Guy eventually!
Dat click o' death!
yes.. I do, actually. And yes, I'll be talking about the click of death.
We had one of those when I was in high school. We had a class where we wrote, performed and recorded 2 or 3 songs, put them on a CD, marketed it, and sold it.
8:17
8-Bit Keys: "So I thought I'd disassemble this thing..."
Me: *It would be rude not to :D*
👩🦳
My musician brother of mine had one of these from 2000 to around 2008 and it was a great little machine. Recorded several albums on it - one of which I mixed.
I have recorded most of my material on this very unique piece of gear. You can hear and see what was used to record the tracks in the additional info for each. hope you dig. Thanks for posting this BR 8 history lesson : soundcloud.com/lofihigh
My first home multitrack recorder. II spent hours in high school with this thing. I still have it.
Actually, all Zip drives eventually function as music players; however the only track they play is called 'Click of Death'. :(
Not *all* of them. Keep them away from external magnetic fields, and make sure yours is one of the ones *with* the foam washer at the end of the actuator's travel zone. (Some idiot in manufacturing thought that removing the washer would make a great cost-saving measure, but all it did was increase the odds that the drive would be damaged if there was ever a power failure.) Mine still works fine, and I've had it for 20 years.
I had one that worked just fine for me, until one of my roommates threw it in the closet for a while, and when I dug it back out.. Well, you can already guess.
The click of death is a pretty exaggerated failure mode. Full of myth and mystery. Not all Iomega drives are susceptible to it. The older ones are especially resistant. Mind you I backed all my stuff of of my zips as soon as I heard tell rumors of the dread click. I never suffered a failure though.
Watch the lgr oddware video about more info on zip disks
special for those who devote their time composing tunes for floppy drives, yes, they use the mechanicals inside floppy drives to play music in clicks.... and you thought the pc speaker was the lowest way to listen to music...
Hi there and THANK YOU for your videos. I bought this BR-8 back in 2000 at Sam Ash. It was roughly $700 and they would throw in a carrying case, however, at the time, Sam Ash had a hard time keeping or getting stock on zip disc, so circuit city or guitar center was the was where I would get em.
There is one feature that this has that you did not cover, and that is the VIRTUAL tracks. Each track has 8 virtual tracks so you can actually keep different ideas/arrangements on each track having a total of 64! Another accessory that was/is available is the foot switch which I would use to punch in and out when recording.... I still own mine. You can actually remove the 100mb Zip drive and replace it with a 250mb which was amazing back then (the jazz drive was KING back then by having the capability of 1.2GB of storage)
I really really enjoy your video and I've learned so much from them. Thank you for sharing your genius with us. Now I will buy one of yout
What interface does the ZIP drive use? is it a floppy or IDE header? maybe you could look at swapping it for a card reader of some kind? Just a thought
Nyx Keres many, many were parallel port, but 40 pin IDE, 25 pin SCSI, and eventually USB zip drives were sold,
Are you asking what this one uses? Because that's a good question.
My guitar instructor had one of these in 1999, it was sooooo expensive, but soooo good. I have several songs we recorded on it. Great trip down memory lane!
I've got one that takes SD cards. It's cool.
Richard Jones br-600 if I'm correct ?
You're almost certainly right but I'm currently too lazy to go upstairs and check.
I had the BR-600, it used Compact flash cards up to max 1GB and had the same recording formats as this zip drive version i think.
I still have one. The exporting was sketchy though....
@Richard Jones maybe you have a modified one! There is some info circulating that you can replace the ZIP drive with an SD card Reader. Unfortunately i haven't been able to get more info. Maybe if you take some photos of your machine... or open it up and show us, you will be making a HUGE contribution to the internet. Please do!
Just discoverd this guy. Keep up the good work bro. Love this old school tech.
your soundtrack is great... you should release it on a video
Agreed.
Came here to say this too. Will wait for the game :)
Still got mine and it still amazes me! Lots of capabilities.
ZIP Drives! Apparently I have some kind of sixth sense for buying obsolete technologies
haa dream on i had a shark 250 drive luckily i was able to trade it to a sucker for a zip usb
I used one of these out in new Brunswick while my band was touring there in 05. I was amazed at how smoothly it worked. I would buy one now.
I suppose If instead zip drive you install IDE/SCSI to CF/SD adapter, than you can put
flash card of 2,4 or more gigabytes, and get more recording time.
I doubt the software supports it, even if adapter emulates a zip drive, would still have a 100MB limit per image
ZIP is always hooked on some HDD interface. In the present case, I do not know whether it's IDE or SCSI disk but they support at least 1 gigabyte drive unless it is deliberately limited to 100 mb. Roland-Boss are subsidiaries and some of the Roland products from that year supports over 1 gigabyte hdd on SCSI zip cable.
I looked at doing this with my unit a while back and from the information I found the firmware for this version wasn't compatible with card readers(didn't find any actual reasons just that it wasn't.) The next model apparently was although even then it apparently required a particular brand card reader. Maybe they where still using older chipsets/firmware for this release. Oh, and no hard limiting on size. They will take 250MB drive without any problems, including using 250MB disks to full capacity.
I should probably clarify that the info I was looking at was relating to Muti-card readers and SD cards. I assume the issues were with recognising the muliple drives in the multi-card readers. This was also simply reports from people who had tries and failed. I didn't have any card readers around at the time to try it myself.
You are correct. There was one particular SD card adapter that was compatible - it was discussed on the yahoo br-8 group. I managed to get hold of one, and replaced the zip drive with it. IIRC correctly it could not recognise more than 512meg cards though (ie it took the card but you could never get more than 512m space)
Hey, 8bit Keys, I’ve started a channel because you inspired me to do it, old tech is pretty much what i like the most interesting thing in my life right now, but i didn’t began with tech video, i’ve done french review of video games, well all i want to say is:thank you for giving me your passion :)
Not opening the shield out of curiosity!? I'm disappointed. I wanted to see you using power tools again! :(
(ahem... Fisher Price I can Play keyboard)
Victor Tran this device is decent. The fisher price keyboard was a piece of crap.
it would'int have been worth it.
I had a BR-8 back in the late 90's early 2000's. It was a great setup for writing songs. Nice video!
Death Click anyone?
Nope. My Zip drive never got the Click of Death. Still works, too.
Death Click is the name of my new band.
I very much remember Zip Disks, but I never had them or the drive. CD-ROM drive/burner and CD-Rs were all that I ever needed.
"...probably won't need more than 6 minutes per track..."
So Dream Theater should probably not use this haha
Love your videos man! Easily one of the most original TH-cam Channels.
"You probably won't need to record a song longer than 6 minutes with 8 tracks"
Tool would beg to differ.
Aarlog
HEY I THOUGHT THE SAME THING
Radio stations used to refuse playing almost any song longer than about 3 minutes. That set the standard for almost every modern composition, even if they never made it outside the rehearsal garage.
In all fairness, if you were recording on this thing back then, you probably weren't getting any airplay anyway.
I've recently been noticing the big amount of other uses for zip disks. Really impressive versatility for the format.
back in 2000, I worked for a small graphical services company and many customers sent us packs of 6 zip catridges to burn into 1 CD so they can have their projects backed up in read only optical discs and re-use the zips in their everyday projects
David,
Thank you for sharing such a interesting video showing a multi-track recorder using a ZIP-100 disk as it's storage.
I used to us a Roland vs840. It bridged the gad between the 4track I used to use to the digital world. It still works today although zip discs were not very reliable. Thanks for sharing!
I had a zipdrive borrowed for a while somewhere around the end of 1990s. I remember we had the 250MB disks already. I don't even remember what we used it for but it was very cool to have a magnetic rewritable medium with such a high capacity back then (there were still 1,44MB floppies common back then).
I started watching your sister channel, and found these videos recently... As a tech person who also makes music, I must say that I'm absolutely in love with your work, and want to thank you for making these videos!
I still have one. I paid 500 quid for it in 1999. It sounded just as good as CD and MD 8 tracks of the time. The BR8 was a BOSS branded cut down version of the Roland digital portable 8 tracks.
The drum machine feature was unique and very handy when thinking about adding live drums to the mix last. It also had an optical connection for mastering to DAT etc.
Nice machine! Roland was always one step ahead of everyone
Great video, I used to have a SCSI ZIP drive that I used with my Akai sampler back in the day. I always wanted the Roland VS-880 multi-track recorder, that had an Iomega drive built in - but that was the 90's!!
That is a pretty neat recorder. I have owned several multi-track recorders over the years, but have been out of recording for a long time and have no idea what is used today. I purchased an Akai hard disc based recorder back in 2001 which is the most advanced recorder I've ever used. I think I remember spending something like 499.99 to get the SCSI CD burner drive for it. I thought it was amazing to burn to CD on the same unit. I have also owned a Yamaha 4 track recorder that used MiniDisc data as its medium.
I remember buying one of these brand new when they first hit the market. I had been recording with a Yamaha 4 track cassette recorder and getting to go digital was such a treat for me then. This SUCKER cost me$850 band new in 1999!!! I wouldn't even dream of paying that for a top of the line laptop today! But!? Look at the selection we had now compared to back then? As a recording musician in 1999? This was A MUST HAVE!!! Now that I work with Studio one 4 I still think about where I started from and looking at all the free software they just toss in with new and free versions of studio one when it gets updated and I think to myself-I would have given my left nut to have just these few new features alone in my Studio one 4 software. We always should remind ourselves where we started with what we get to use so freely today!? I'm so thankful to be alive and well in this year of our Lord 2020!!!
It is similar to a recording studio That I owned a couple of years ago.
It was the Zoom MRS-802, from around 2003, it had a CD-RW writer and an internal standard Hard Disk IDE on it. Also It had 8 separate tracks, but you can store your songs directly on CD, or hard drive.
Also the hard drive was used for storing the samples of the internal drum machine, which has a very good sound, and some demo songs.
I briefly owned this unit but didn't like it so I immediately sold it, and replaced it with a Yamaha Multitrack MD Minidisc Recorder or MD8, this unit was just as easy to use as my previously owned Analog 8 Track which recorded to cassette tapes, and I recorded a lot on that machine and I still have most of the songs and proud of about 30, the rest were simple scratch recordings/ just goofing around. The quality was excellent. All of my recordings are original songs and I used a combination of guitars, bass, keyboards and an external Roland R70 drum machine, (which you should review by the way because that unit still sounds great, even by today's standards) Anyway, great video thanks.
For those who doesn't know, ZIP discs were generally the go-to for backing up entire computers back in the day. As mentioned in this video, hard drives were generally not much larger than that and with some compression, you could even fit two hard drives on a single disc.
The discs were cheap enough, but the drives could cost a fortune.
Glad to see more 8-bit keys, keep up the good work.
That TASCAM 4-track cassette recorder was an awesome piece of technology in it's day, too. Brings back memories for me.
An interesting watch! I still use my BOSS BR-600 from 8-9 years back for all of my jamming/recording needs. Never saw any reason to upgrade since it still just works and has everything I need.
We used zip 100 disks as late as 2004/2005 in highschool for an new advanced media academy (usb thumbdrives eventually became affordable).
Unfortunately, we had a 20-30% fail rate on the zip drives; which taught us to backup and many of us ended up hauling external harddrives and writing cd-rw's.
But if we were in a hurry or didn't have any other option; zip-disk it was.
I saved the output of many photoshop, illustrator, premiere (the original), and after effects projects on zip disks. Ah, memories.
This was my first digital workstation. I started on cassette based stations, but this was the first I personally owned. Nice little piece of kit for it's day.
It's a fascinating device from something of a transition period. Before USB and SD cards started to dominate everything.
I still have a ZIP drive on the grounds that being able to read obsolete storage media is quite useful.
That-s the same reason I still own a VHS recorder and 3.5 and 5.25 inch floppy drives even though I don't have the drives installed in anything.
They're around just in case I need them.
A close friend of mine who is a graphics artist stored most of her projects (photoshop and other similar programs) on a ZIP disk during that time frame as well. They were pretty popular during the time as I recall.
Just broke mine out and dusted it off. I had to relearn everything. It's quite a complex machine with many capabilities. The internal effects and drum tracks are nice, or I sometimes mic my amps and use a live sound for the input (going through a pre-mixer first). The BR8 is still quite impressive for its age. I considered buying a new digital studio, but after reading reviews and spec sheets, I realized that this old BR8 is just as capable as many of the latest machines, with the exception of the storage media of course. I don't mind using ZIP discs - I have lots of them and a couple of drives. So, I'm happy to hang onto my money and work with what I have.
My first device for home recording. Bought it brand new. I recorded some nice tracks with it back in the day.
Back in 1988 (yes 1988) I bought a 4 track recorder card for the Mac IIcx. It could record 4 tracks to the HDD at 16bit\44Mhz. The limitation at that time was HDD space. The largest HDDs were about 100mb, costing several hundred each. Professional Studios might have 1GB HDDs costing thousands per HDD.
Awesome that you found some hardware still using Zip Disks after i asked a review about them as a obsolete storage media :) Keep up the good work!
Hmm... I never knew such a thing existed. Neat.
I had one of these. It was so much fun to work with. Very intuitive. Easy to find your way around. But I always filled the zip disc far too quickly. Then I got the Roland VS-890 which was probably the best at the time but so much more complicated to work with and I only ever figured out about 30% of the features.
I bought one of these brand new back in the day and recorded an entire album on it. I still use the BR-8 to this day in combination with a USB ZIP drive for transferring tracks to my PC. It's a great machine and pretty affordable.
How do I get the D drive to appear in the br8 wav converter to open the songs I'm using an iomega zip 100 USB drive
WOW ! I have a BR-532, I got when I was 12, and I think It may have been border lining "old" back then haha This is great, I love the history of these old digital units
on the fly multitrack recording put alot of strain on the zip drives more than anything else so this was a good way to get a drive already known to be temperamental to fail even quicker, still wasnt much else they could have used to bring it to the market back in 1999.
also the boss sp 808 groove sampler used zip disk multitrack recording thats a very nice peice of equipment.
In 1999, I was recording to a Macintosh computer's hard disk. It was cheaper than buying a BR-8 or buying a DAT machine for me at the time. Thank you for Cubase!
My first 4 track recorder was the boss
br 532!! Great content!
I had one and loved creating songs with it!
A very cool mastering system! Usable for song by song recording but still very usable.
I have one and still use it today. Thanks for sharing. One hit wonder 😃
Love your videos! You definitely put a lot of time and effort into them. Keep up the good work!
I remember when my elementary school adopted the use of zip disks. They use to lock up the hardware (standalone reader & disks) because they were so expensive at the time. I don't remember them being around for all that long though, it seems right around that same time CD's were taking off pretty rapidly. I also remember that same elementary school using word processing machines that were portable, like a laptop (but flat with a very small 2"x10" screen) that they also locked up in a special cart. we had to check them out when we would use them and we got yelled at if we didn't carry them with both hands, lol. Oh, now that I think of it, and after doing a quick google search, the word processor was the alpha smart pro.
That thing deserves a spot on your wall!
I still have the BR-8 I purchased brand new in 2000. The zip disk was for recording only. Not storage. I used a fiber optic cable from the BR-8 to my CD burner and recorded after I had my mix right on the BR-8. The issue today is finding Zip disks to record on.
Man,a friend of mine who used to teach me guitar has recorded all his first solo album using this unit,and i can tell u,sounds really nice.
Zip Drives! Man that brings me back! I remember getting into college and just being amazed at the storage of 100mb! haha how times have changed!
Here is a cool trick I learned off of recordologies channel I believe:
If you are curious about discrete circuits and logic ICs etc but don't want to tair up a cool piece of equipment you can look up the FCC ID for the appliance and there should be internal shots of the appliance on that database for you to look at complete with schematics and everything.
I used one of these for ages. Great basic machine
What's great is that it does have a line out, MIDI out. So you can export those sounds to a DAW via interface. So it's still has options to be useful, though the workflow may be more convoluted.
Interesting blast from the past for me as, my friend had one of these and recorded 3 albums with it. For each one, he brought it over to mine to mix those 3 albums. However... this is the first time I've seen the Zoom wav converter utility. Soooo... this means we spent loads of time re-recording it onto my daw. 3 albums... The only saving grace was, I connected it up via the coaxial digital output, so, there's that, I guess.