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Post subject: Fender Passport with external hard drive
Posted: Fri Nov 23, 2012 8:45 am
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Hobbyist
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Joined: Fri Nov 23, 2012 8:31 am
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I recently purchased a passport 500 for my uncle. He is very happy with it at his smaller venues. However, he records his performances and fills up his flash drives quickly. I'm considering setting him up with an external drive so he has much more space to record and playback, if he wants. While searching for any compatibility issues, I read that there shouldn't be issues with flash drives. My question is if there are any problems with using a larger capacity external drive, say a 250, or a 500GB? Has anyone had any experience using an actual drive?

Thanks for your time.


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Post subject: Re: Fender Passport with external hard drive
Posted: Fri Nov 23, 2012 2:40 pm
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Aspiring Musician
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I wouldn't even try it. The issue is that FLASH drives generally use a file system that is different from a hard drive, and your Fender Passport 500 Pro is not running MS Windows or Mac OS X. It has some kind of proprietary, miniature OS designed for the one task of recording and playing music files on a USB FLASH drive.

See the Wikipedia article on ExFAT:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExFAT

This is the file system used for large USB FLASH drives, like 64GB drives. Hard drives you describe will usually use NTFS (the file system native to all recent versions of MS Windows) or a different file system native to Mac OS X. I doubt that ExFAT can handle the capacity you are seeking.

My advice is to use a higher capacity USB FLASH drive and now and then move the files to his computer's hard drive, wiping the FLASH drive for another load of recordings. 64GB is a lot of recording time.

Also consider that even if you could hook up a high capacity external hard drive, how would he manage all those files? There's no display to show you file names. You can't use folders. Everything has to be in the root of the drive. More than a dozen recordings on this thing becomes a bear to manage.

Do all your file management on a computer, where you can create folders with meaningful names, and maybe even give the recordings meaningful file names so you can find the recording you want.

The Passport's USB port is for collecting a few recordings (then moving them somewhere else for use) and for placing a few recordings for playing during the break, carefully named so they'll play in the order you want. It's not for a single repository for your lifetime of recordings. You'd get one long, sequential list of recordings with no options for skipping to the most recent recording except for a "next track" button.


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Post subject: Re: Fender Passport with external hard drive
Posted: Fri Nov 23, 2012 2:42 pm
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Aspiring Musician
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Joined: Wed Feb 16, 2011 7:24 am
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Did I say 64GB? I meant 16GB. Tats still a LOT of recording time.


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