A Few Newbie Questions

  • Thread starter Thread starter thunderbread
  • Start date Start date
thunderbread said:
Ah, this is what I intended to do.



What I meant was this- I would record 4 separate tracks on 2 separate tapes, 4 on each tape. I would run each tape separately into one file in Audacity, so I can use a 4 track recorder to create a song with 8 tracks, then burn it to CD. IS this doable?
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Ah, yes, this could indeed be made to work...but the caveats are that with no time synchronization, you'll be lining them up as carefully as you can by ear...and you will have to be clever about how you monitor the previously recorded tracks while you are performing the other "set" of four tracks for the song.

Personally, I still advise you to walk before you run--get the hang of four tracks first before you try "cheating the system" as it were ;) Others may disagree...
 
briank said:
Ah, yes, this could indeed be made to work...but the caveats are that with no time synchronization, you'll be lining them up as carefully as you can by ear...and you will have to be clever about how you monitor the previously recorded tracks while you are performing the other "set" of four tracks for the song.

Personally, I still advise you to walk before you run--get the hang of four tracks first before you try "cheating the system" as it were ;) Others may disagree...
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Alright, sounds like it'll have to do. Thanks again for the help, man.
 
jpmorris said:
AFAIK the only real way to synchronize two cassette tapes is to pull them into a DAW and line them up digitally.
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There are some very expensive and rare sync boxes for rackmount Tascam 8-track cassettes. I saw one on Ebay once. Once. It sold for some insane amount of money. Well over $200 and closer to $300, I believe.

Now, you can stripe SMPTE onto one track of a Portastudio with a MOTU MIDI Timepiece AV (MTP), and the MTP will convert it to MIDI Machine Control (MMC) to control devices that support MMC.
 
diggy_dude said:
There are some very expensive and rare sync boxes for rackmount Tascam 8-track cassettes. I saw one on Ebay once. Once. It sold for some insane amount of money. Well over $200 and closer to $300, I believe.
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The ATS-500 (at least with the ROM version I have) looks like it will recognise the 238, 688, 644 and 464 in addition to the TSR and MSR machines that I use it on.
However, the last person to have tried this kind of thing on cassette decks could not make it work reliably enough and concluded that the tape itself was deforming slightly and causing phasing issues. He was trying to lock a pair of 688s together.
 
Do the 8-track Portas have the Syncaset port like the 238?
 
diggy_dude said:
Do the 8-track Portas have the Syncaset port like the 238?
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The 644 and 688 do, and the ATS500 manual does actually mention this.

The part of the ROM I was studying earlier has the name of the TASCAM devices which the ATS-500 can identify via the serial port, so in principle the 464 should, but I wouldn't bet on it (it is not mentioned in the ATS500 manual).
 
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