You will have to excuse me for not knowing all the new terms. I am an old tape man just new to digital. Seems to me tape was so much easier.
I have reformated the HD many times now and it still makes a jumbled mess of the recordings at the final step. I have been following the instruction book.
I make my recordings mainly on track 1 and 2. I then mix these down to track 7/8 and following what the book says try to change these to a wav file for burning. I don't even know what a Wav file is. but I end up with an error message saying comprimised file and the song is all out of sync and mixed up.
I don't know how they can advertise this thing as being simple to use. I had to read and reread the manual for a month before I could get a sound out of it.
I have other folks tell me to download the newest version of software to the recorder but I have no clue on how to do that, and there aren't very many IT men way out here in the sticks
Also if I get the Wavmanager on my PC can I download the individual files and then mix them or do they have to be mixed first?
Last question, if all this fails is there a way to turn my tape recordings into CDs???
I don't know but I guess I'm missing something here about 'changing to .wav files' the Foxtex recorders only record in .wav files. I also don't understand how it's making a jumble of all your files. Where did you buy the unit, online or from a local store? I'd check with the pro audo department at a good local music store, Guitar Center if there's one near you. They'll be able to help you hands on.
Personally I'd forget all about the 2mix thing, I never use it at all, it was confusing to me. When I first got my recorder I tried using it but when I opened the folder I always saw a gazillion files and some of them had nothing on them and I had to fish through them to find the ones that did have the information on them. With the WavManager it's a simple matter to move your recorded tracks individually to your pc to to save and work with. It works in reverse too, if you want to put the tracks back on the recorder to work with, remixing, add more tracks, or whatever.
I also recommend that you keep a 'track record'. I do it 2 ways, I keep a spiral notebook handy and write everything down, what's on track 1, track 2 and so on. What onboard effect I used, pan settings, gain settings, etc. I also make a Word document with all that same information and keep it in the folder with the tracks.
As for mixing, you can do that several ways. I do most of my mixing on the recorder itself, bouncing the mix to either 5/6 or 7/8, in your case, I'm now using an MR16HD so I have 2 (actually 4) extra channels to bounce to, 9-16. You can also use the WavManager to export all tracks to your pc and mix with any good recording program, I use several, an old version of Cakewalk Pro 7, Cakewalk Sonar 8 & Producer and then do your mixing there. I have a pc that is dedicated to my recording with an external hard drive, so once I have everything recorded I save the .wav files to a folder, one folder for each song, on the external hd. I then do my mix/bounce and put the mixed tracks into a sub-folder in that folder.
For editing I still like to use the Cakewalk Pro 7, very simple to edit off click tracks or long blank spaces in the beginning or whatever and do fades, and then save those tracks in the same sub-folder as the mixed tracks (5/6 - 7/8 in your case) from the recorder. This is where your mixed tracks come in if you are mixing on the recorder itself. Most pc recording programs also work with .wav files so you insert one track on track 1 and the other on track 2 to do your editing. You can also add eq's and effects in the pc program. It's all a matter of what works best for you. Then after you've got your mix the way you like it, convert your mix to mp3. Do a Google search and you should be able to find a free older version of Musicmatch Jukebox, there is a website called olderversion.com, or something like that where you can find such things and download them to your pc. I still find that the simplest conversion program and I've tried several others that were a lot more complicated to use. Musicmatch is basically a 1 click operation. You will probably have to adjust the bitrate, but that's a simple slide bar, and you want 128kbps for the best cd quality recordings at the smallest file size. If I'm wrong about any of this I'm sure someone will correct me, lol....
This forum is a very good place to find answers for most anything related to recording and such. I've gotten a lot of help from the people here with more know how than I have. I'm still in a learning process myself with a lot of things. So don't give up the ship. I'm a long way from being an expert at this myself but I learn something new everyday just from hands on experience along with advice I get from other users. What I'm telling you here is just from my personal experience and what I've found to work easiest for me. I've taken cd's of my mixes to friends who are more in the know than I and they've all told me I seemed to be doing things right.
I hope some of this helps you out and that I haven't confused you more than you already are. I've tried to explain it as simply as I could. If you want I would be happy to do what I can to help you off forum if you want to write direct to me at:
aceteleman77@yahoo.com. I'll do what I can. Some of the things the experts on here talk about are beyond me technically too but I know their intentions are good.
The Teleman
