Hey everyone, I’m looking to buy the Aeros looper and I noticed that there is a 20 minute recording time per song. Is that 20 minute recording for each individual track, i.e. i can have multiple tracks and parts being 20 minutes each, or is it 20 minutes total, i.e. I can only have 5 four minute tracks. I know that if I save the song the overdubs are combined and save some space, but I’m wondering what the 20 minutes is like for a continuous song if that makes sense. Thanks!
See these for a bit of clarity…(perhaps clarity isn’t the best word to use…how about… “more info” since I haven’t tested the outer limits as of yet)
TLDR; The 20 minute limit (10 if recording in stereo I think) is how much you can record on Aeros before you need to stop and save.
You can split up the 20 minutes in however many or few tracks/parts you want. So no single track can be longer than 20 minutes.
Once you save you get another 20 minutes to use as you wish.
My guess is once the import feature is complete, you should be able to import a much longer than 20 minute track for playback. The limit only affects recording.
I have an aeros coming, and i’m trying to understand this…it seems to be that if you want to make use of this possible hours worth of recording time, it is only by assembling tons of individual tracks of 20 minutes each? and then for every track that you want to record into, you need to stop and save?
i guess i’m confused, since this is a looper. Why do you need to stop and save if the limit is 20 minutes - why can’t it just repeat at that point? Or why can’t it simply save automatically? (I guess because it has to be stopped first).
I do want to stress that i had read this before i pulled the plug on a refurbished one with a 10% discount on top. I’m just wondering how it actually works. I can live with 20 minutes, but ideally I’d like to be able to record very long tracks on occasion (much longer than that). I’m taking it that it cannot record directly onto the sd card?
in any case, glad to be a part of this community. The more interesting loopers (as loopers) are to my mind instruments like the loupe, the old echoplexes, the lp1 - but these have more limited recording times. But i’m not putting down the more limited feature set of the aeros - it’s a totally different kind of instrument, and it should come in very handy. But yeah - can someone lay out exactly how this recording time thing works? Can I really not record a track for say, 45 minutes, even if i am using a card?
It’s not so straightforward, basically, the Aeros requires some buffers that use memory once tracks have been recorded to the part. There are two major factors:
Start of Tracks Memory
Contains the first 10 seconds of all the tracks in the song.
It allows users to quickly change song parts without loading the full tracks.
Memory Usage Calculation :
Memory used (s) = [Number of saved tracks in song] x 10s
Memory Usage can only change after saving a song.
Live Playback Tracks Memory
Contains the currently playing sections of each track of the current song part.
The sections have a duration of 9 seconds and are dynamically loaded during playback.
The sections are reused between song parts and are used only for saved tracks and not for recorded tracks that are not yet saved.
Memory Usage Calculation :
Memory used (s) = [Maximum number of saved tracks per part in song] x 9s
Basically the amount of time left to record after saving becomes less than it originally was with each new recorded track. The amount of time left to record is dynamically calculated based on how many track there are in the song in total and how many tracks there are in the part that has the most tracks.
Here is a recording time calculator!
You would not be able to record several 20 minute tracks, because after saving the first 20 min track, you would not have 20 minutes left you would have 19:41.
This is not perfect but allows for more capacity than before by a long shot, it also makes it impossible to run out of overdub space.
AFAIK dev says this could be the case, there would be no theoretical limit on length of import
Not exactly, we see 20 minutes as an extreme, the Aeros is not really meant to be used for long tracks, at the end of the day it is a looper and there are limits and if you would like 45 minutes for now I think you are best off with Ableton or something that is computer based.
You may be confusing “saving” with “writing”, the Aeros does not save everything that is written to it, a user could record to all 6 tracks in each of 6 parts and not save the song after recording. Saving the song allows a user to reopen it later, the Aeros does not require saving to play back a looped sound.
There are RAM limitations to recording, all live recordings (pre-saving) are handled by the RAM. Once you save, all playback is loaded dynamically from your SD or internal memory. As you record more tracks however, these tracks require memory to work and thus they reduce the overall available recording time after saving.
We may be able to do Dynamic Recording, but cannot say when or even if it is actually possible. Very long term feature.