“Backing Up Or Archiving On A Roland VS-880?”

From an inSync reader: “As one of the many proud owners of a Roland VS-880 (purchased from Sweetwater of course) I find I have some questions about backing up data to either a DAT or external hard drive. What exactly is the difference between backing up a song as “playable” verses “archiving” ? Is there some fundamental difference between the two? Do you lose any sound quality in the “archive” format since some kind of conversion may be taking place? Can you backup a song, reload it, back it up again, on infinitum without any loss?” Thanks for your questions, and for choosing Sweetwater Sound as your dealer!The questions you’re asking actually refer to copying data between hard drives, not backing up to DAT tape. The difference between “playable” and “archive” copying have to do with the destination media.When copying song data as “playable” an exact copy of the complete song data is made on the destination disk drive. The disk must have enough free space to hold the entire file. A “playable” file is ready to play or edit as is.Use the “archive” setting when the destination drive is a removable mechanism (i.e. Zip), and the song being copied is too large to fit on one disk. The “Archive” setting will dynamically write the file to disk, asking for new disks when necessary. When loading this archived file back into your VS-880, you will need to again set the copy mode to “Archive”, and use the “Extract Archive Function” to restore the song to playable status.Full directions for using these commands are on pages 44 and 45 of the original VS-880 owner’s manual, or pages 94-96 of the Expanded VS-880 manual.When backing up to DAT, use the “SNG DAT Backup” parameter, as described on pages 46-47 of the original owner’s manual, pages 97-99 of the newer Expanded VS-880 owner’s manual.No audio degradation should result from performing any of these operations. You are simply making digital “clones” of the original data. Copy away…

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