This is about the way the SQ-Series chooses directory and filenames for multitrack-recordings.
Context
The way the SQ-Series handled filenames when Multitrack recording was always a bit rudimentary (and that is an understatement). Before the latest firmware updates we didn’t even had the tracknames in the files, which had me rubbing my eyes when I first saw this. That omission by A&H produced a major headache on a weekly basis for me, which even made me write a piece of software to deal with this, since the tracknames were stored in the Broadcast headers of the wav files..
This was so clearly unacceptable I am happy A&H decided to do the bare minimum and use the track names as file names. While that was a 100% improvement, the result is still just the bare minimum and it is quite frankly a bit shameful someone at A&H ever deemed this acceptable.
Remaining Issues
Leaves us with another thing. If you need to record multiple sessions onto the same USB drive there is no real way to tell those apart. On other products, like the cheapest field recorders or a smartphones dictation app you would at least be able to infer what it was based on the file creation date/time. The SQ series does not seem to have the required RTC chip, so it does not appear to have a concept of date and time.
So let’s say I record two sessions from two days onto the same USB drive, both sessions will end up in the USBMTK directory just being discernable by the numbers (SQ-MT001, SQMT-002, etc). Especially when recordings are similar and you don’t keep a manual log of what happened when accross multiple days this has SQ-users turn into forensic analysts on a regular basis afterwords
Potential Solutions
In an ideal world some engineer at AH would have insisted at putting a Real Time Clock (RTC) chip into the mixer so it knows about date and time and can write that into the files. Why? Because that is expected behaviour. I was extremely negatively surprised when I realized that this expected thing wasn’t working with the SQ.
But I see that adding a missing piece of hardware that likely isn’t there is not a viable option, so I have another proposal:
How about incrementing a counter whenever the SQ is booted and using that for the folder structure?
So here we would see the result of recording two recordings onto the same drive on two separate days with the mixer switched off inbetween.
USBMTK
|--- SESSION-001
| |--- SQ-MT001
| |--- SQ-MT002
|--- SESSION-002
| |--- SQ-MT001
| |--- SQ-MT002
|--- ...
This should be trivially easy to implement in its most basal form and would go a long way to fixing the current unacceptable situation. When the counter reaches 999 you reset back to 001 or you allow a manual reset/setting of that counter.
If you really want to go the extra mile/kilometer, you could allow users to name these sessions. Given the current filenames I guess you may have some limitations regarding filenames, but you’re already doing it for tracks as well, so there might be some reusable code there.
Whether there is extra capacity for this on the microcontroller EEPROM I can’t tell, but we’re not talking about a lot of data here.
I think it is not outlandish to ask for this feature, it is basically something that should have been there from the start. Even my old 2004 digital camera has an option to create folders. This is the bare minimum.
Maybe the SQ has an RTC chip that I don’t happen to know of, using that would be the even better option. The cheapest Zoom recorders from 15 years ago can do that.