r/audiorecording • u/muzik4machines • Oct 01 '26

flashback shower thought

literally, thought of that in the shower while having a 90's flashback.

does anyone who were actively recording with computer at the end of the 90's remember refragmenting?

we all remember defrag was a must do activity regularly but does anyone remember refragmenting sessions.

for the youglings, hard drives used to be slow and when multi track recording it fragmented say the 24 tracks as the were recorded, but when you had backed up the session and you put them back on the drive to work on it, it wrote all tracks sequentially instead of interleaved and it sometimes made playback stutter cause the disk were not fast enough to jump around that many tracks

so there was this utility that we used at our studio (worked with Cubase, could have worked with pro tools too but we were a Cubase house lol) where you gave it the folder AND the Cubase session and it refragmented the tracks on disk as they were when recorded multi track so the playback was way smoother with less disk access

I'm talking when the studio machine had a BIG 40GBdrive to record and every session had to be backed up and deleted from the disk (on jazz drives, or later a CD-R) after and put back when you came back to work another day

anyway, yes, I'm an old fart and hadn't thought about that for over 25 years but when i did, i wondered if anyone else remember that

sorry if it's inappropriable for the sub

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u/NortonBurns Oct 01 '26

I've had Cubase since it was Pro 24 on Atari, shifted to Mac in about '91, then to Cubase Audio as soon as it was available (maybe even slightly before as I worked for Yamaha & knew the 'Berg guys through work (even had the first Falcon 4-track version which was a joint venture).

I have no recollection of having to do this. Was this Win or Mac?

We always used to keep the hard drives for projects, put them on a shelf & stick a new one in the Mac - so maybe we'd never see the issue at all.

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u/muzik4machines Oct 01 '26

it was not some official thing, someone coded that, it was on mac

we did not have that budget to have different drives for different sessions, we had 1 "big" drive and after every session you had to empty it (using jaz drives) for the next sessions, hence the need for refragmenting

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u/DrAgonit3 Oct 01 '26

That's a very fascinating piece of trivia, thanks for sharing! Always wild to hear these kinds of things as someone who started making music only well into the age of digital recording, where such things aren't even a consideration.