aligning 8 tracks of audio

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kent2002

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I have had my old 8 track analog multitracks of songs remastered to CDs. The individual trakcs have been preserved. I want to load these up onto a $1000 - $1500 digital multitrack recorder. How would I do I do this and how would I get all tracks aligned in time with the others? :eek:
 
Kent,

There's a couple of issues to look at here...

First, there's the question of whether the tracks on your CD are already time-algned or it; i.e. do they all start at the exact (and I mean exact) same time? If they do, then importing them into something like Sonar or any other similar multitrack editor is a piece of cake. Just load them in one at a time and slide each track to that they all start at the very beginning of the timeline.

If the tracks on your CD are not perfectly time-aligned like that - which is probably the case - then what you need to do is import the tracks one at a time and then slide them back and forth in the timline carefully until they line up. usually it's easiest if you start with the rhythm tracks (drums and bass), aligning the sounds and waveforms until they line up. If you have something like the drummer doing a coutdown with his sticks or a vocalist counting off with their voice, and there's bleed of those sounds across tracks, then it can be even easier to align by just lining up the initial attacks on the visible waveforms of those countoffs.

Then if you have more than 8 tracks per song, you'll have to decide how to mix down some of those tracks to only 8 tracks so that it'll all fit on your tape deck.

The next issue is getting those tracks out to your multitrack tape recorder. For that you'd need an interface that allowed you to send all your tracks out from your computer to the tape machine simultaneously. In this caseit would be an 8-channel I/O box to handle all 8 tracks at once.

HTH,

G.
 
Thanks. I wanted to use the Zoom MRS1608CD for this but it doesn't look like I'll be able to. I still prefer a stand alone unit to software. I need the portability and don't want to deal with time lag when overdubbing using software. The Zoom has nothing in the manual about aligning tracks. I'm going to look at a Roland 16 or 24 track unit that has a video card so you can hook up a monitor and mouse to do visual editing. I'll look into that. The zoom is not really diesigned for editing work. Still a pretty cool little machine though. If I were doing this project from scratch, I'd stay with it. I love their effects.
 
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