Tascam 424 MKII and Mixing on a computer

H

Hiccup Master

New member
I posted this in the Tascam forum too and thought I would get some better feedback here.

I was reading through a few threads about problems people have had with recording, mostly mixing problems.

My question is could I record each instrument on it's own tape, take it home and hook my portastudio up to my computer and turn all the analog tapes to digital tracks and mix them on my computer with like cakewalk or a simalar program?

I.E. Drums on tape 1
Bass on tape 2
Guitar on tape 3
lead vocals on tape 4
back up vocals on tape 5

Upload them onto my computer with the Line-Out RCA jacks with a Y spliter to a 1/8th jack to the Line In on my computer, turn them in to .wavs, and import them into a mixing program, mix each wav into 1 wav for a cd, and then into an mp3 to send to people over the internet?

And any suggestions on mixing programs on the computer to use?

Thanks in advance for the Feed back guys.
 
AS long as a signal is coming into your soundcard you can make any analog stuff into digital, if you are doing each track, well it absolutely possible in most of the multitrack softwares, but it is a real long process. You have to run all the analog tapes and record it in teh softare, then the main step is to allign them all to timing, then you mix and bounce them to one stereo track. Since you are going to do more than one track os analog to digital convertion, make sure your noise level is low, or else after you mix all teh tracks it would sound terrible. Cakewalk is a very good software, you could try that. Good Luck!
 
If I were doing strickly audio (.wav) I would use a multi tracking software like SAW Plus or Nuendo, Vegas or something. Thats if your not gonna need midi.

As for timing, I used to do something similar with a Tascam 488 MKII. I had a little midi box that would also allow me to use SMPTE. I was stripping midi between the Tascam and Cakewalk 4.

I used to run line out from the Tascam to line in on the puter.

What the stripping did was allow me to Start cakewalk, then Cakewalk would send a signal to the Tascam and the tracks would play using some type of audio signal that kept both Cakewalk and the Tascam timed up. Someone else could elab more on this for it's been a while for me.

I would mute channels on the Tascam and send them to cakewalk 1 channel at a time.

Good Luck
Malcolm
 
why don't you just use the 424 as your mixer, run the line out to your soundcard input(s) and track directly to the computer (cakewalk or whatever)?

Or record each instrument on a separate track, then mix down to the computer...
 
dafunkewun said:
why don't you just use the 424 as your mixer, run the line out to your soundcard input(s) and track directly to the computer (cakewalk or whatever)?

Or record each instrument on a separate track, then mix down to the computer...
Click to expand...

I would do that but I won't be recording at my house. We're in my friends basement and he doesn't have a computer at his house that is decent enough to use for this.
 
You could have a problem. Often those tape machines will play back just a little bit different every time, resulting in all your bleeding ambient noise to go out of phase. I tried this once, and it didn't work out at all.

Give it a shot though. Maybe you'll be luckier than I was.
 
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