heeeeeeeeello my 404og is now suddenly making a crunchy sound when i press any pad. it sounds like a garbage disposal. then some pads that i know have sounds on them will light up when pressed but won't play anything. other pads play that crunchy sound on it for like half a second. i don't know.. it's all randomly happening as i type this. super bummed

Sorry to hear that..

What happened prior to this? Did the machine sustain any damages or drops? Have you tried opening it up and seeing if there are any broken connections or burns on the PCB?

If you are lucky it's just the external memory card failing or the power supply.

ITS WORKING!

i left it off for a couple minutes and turned it on and it is good now

aaalright it's happening again. i exported a beat and then plugged it into my card reader to upload it onto my computer. once i put the cf card back into my 404 i'm running into this problem again. ahh

UPDATE

now any bank i go to it says FMT [format] as when you get a new card to put in the sp for the first time. so im assuming all my samples are gone for good?

Can your computer read the cf card? Also which cf you have? Very important step is to check the power supply before doing anything...

yeah my computer read the card. i uploaded a beat then when i put my jamedia 1gb back in the problem started happening. my power supply is good, there's no batteries in my 404 so the cables the only source of power

if you are skilled in electronics and measured the power supply properly no need to try loading the card with sp404 on batteries...
Make an image of the card in your pc, then format the card inside the sp404 and try to record anything to see if t works.
Else try another compatible cf card to check if the sp404 card reader is dead or not.

so i copied the ROLAND folder on the card and have that backed up on my mac and formatted the memory card. i want to try and import the roland folder back to my card to hopefully get the samples back but not sure how to do it. i tried dragging the roland folder back onto the card then put it back in my sp but when i went to any bank it wanted me to format again before i could use it. so it deleted the backup that i tried to load. any suggestions?

You missed some steps:


Image is different thing than copying a folder


Hopefully you format the card with 404 and not with your computer


Did you tried it and share some info?

i formatted the card through my 404. yea i guess i don't know how to make an image then.. how would i do that on a mac?

i can record on my 404. my internal banks still have my sounds on it from before and it's not making that weird noise anymore

While you're busy trying out this card thing, do yourself a favor to rule out the power supply and run your system on batteries. The idea of trouble shooting is you generally want to isolate each initial probable cause and then test them...for your power supply issue, you can test whether it's the cause by running your system on batteries without doing anything to the CF card...and generally you want to make one change each time...it's like playing that game MASTERMIND, except the 404 is your opponent and you ask which pegs you got right by turning it on and using it.

my 404 og used to do the same thing. i've lost cards full of (non-backed up, usually) sounds and loops over 4 times with this bullshit.

i figured it was my card. i had some 1gb cf that would work fine until eventually going thru some of what yer describing. with mine, it would be crunchy distorted and FUCKED and would play noise interspersed inconsistently from other banks AND/OR sounds i had previously deleted from a long time ago (!!!). it's actually a cool effect tbh but usually not when you haven't backed up anything and now all yer beats are gone forever then when you turn it on again after this initial time it tells you that you have no choice but to format everything. sucks bro

what is crazy to do is apply affects to those fucked up samples. it cuts them off abruptly with a suuuper weird tail-end reverby sound (!?!). grab some rca cables and turn dem lemons into lemonade baby

the 404 runs off batteries .. my card is now formatted so i couldn't mess with the messed up samples now. did your 404 work once you replaced the card? because i'll get another one if that'll fix it.

my 404 is fine again but this has happened too many times and i'm not going to risk it happening again, it hurts to loose all those sounds i've had

i made a copy of the folder titled 'ROLAND' from the card before i formatted it and inside that folder it has folder titled 'BKUP1' and a few other BKUP folders, then there's a folder called 'SP404' which has a bunch of .spd files [never heard of that]
....is that all my previous sounds before formatting? if so how can i get it back onto the 404?