Aligning tracks in Audacity

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coddledone

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I just recorded my band via a Tascam Portastudio for cassettes and am doing a little bit of mixing in Audacity. I don't have any USB interface for bouncing the tracks from tape to Audacity just run an audio cable to my laptop's mic jack from my portastudio's phones jack and thus have to add track-by-track.
I'm having the hardest time trying to line up the tracks. It seems like I line it up somewhere, hearing things sounding off later into the song, line it up there, and then where I previously lined the track off sounds off. Just curious as to why this seems so difficult and what I could do to make the process easier. I have my doubts the tape is messed up because I can play all the tracks at once and they sound fine.
 
The problem is the tape machine motor playing the tracks at a variable rate. You won't notice anything when playing all the tracks together as they'll all vary in line. But recording them separately and trying to line them up is an almost impossible task. You need a way to record all tracks, individually, at the same time, to keep them time.
 
So I suppose this would call for some multi-channel USB interface? I can bounce all the tracks from the tape machine at once into one track but then I can't edit each track individually. Though I can edit more on the tape machine... Thanks!
 
If you can get all tracks across individually at the same play through of the tape, you'll have a better result, yes. But can your Tascam actually do that? Does it have the individual outputs?

And if you're going to buy the gear to do that, you may as well just learn to record via PC as well. Unless you have a particular fondness for cassettes....
 
You could put a marker on your tracks as a collective before or after the material required for the actual finished track, a single short click at reasonable gain and then use that in Audacity when viewing the tracks to align them.

Regards

Tim
 
Phrasemaker said:
You could put a marker on your tracks as a collective before or after the material required for the actual finished track, a single short click at reasonable gain and then use that in Audacity when viewing the tracks to align them.

Regards

Tim
Click to expand...

How would that prevent drift?
 
Sorry dude, thought you were having grief just aligning the tracks, I should have engaged the grey a bit more while reading the post.
It appears odd that the process you are using to transfer the audio seems to be varying the timing of tracks. Like has already been said the wow and flutter of the tape transport although small is not the same each time you play an individual track, hence the variance.
My apology for misunderstanding your problem, the only way I think of to make the transferred audio align better, is to make a number of copies of each track and stack them in the audacity window, then make a small adjustment along the time line with each copy, working with a couple of tracks at at time, then silence the audio where the overlaps occur to mix into one track from half a dozen copies, and have a chosen track as a reference to adjust each subsequent track to.

It would have to important material for one to go to the effort and require very careful aligning to get it to sound usable.
As I say, my misunderstanding.

Regards

Tim
 
Hi, I think the problem is the tape machine motor playing the tracks at a variable rate. Have you checked?

Big
 
If I'm following this OP is trying to drop individual pairs of tape tracks into Audacity and then trying to line them up in Audacity. I'm not sure this is so much pitch variation on the tape side as trying to sync the tracks in Audacity with the tracks on the Portastudio without some kind of master time reference for both. If you have the portastudio, what is preventing you from mixing with that? Which Portastudio?
 
biglol said:
Hi, I think the problem is the tape machine motor playing the tracks at a variable rate. Have you checked?

Big
Click to expand...

The problem is that even a good tape machine will have a tape speed error %, say over a 3 min song, a 5 second variation at the end is only 0.0027% speed error, mains voltage variations during playback would make this error very hard to achieve. When transferring from tape you either have to playback all the tracks into the computer at the same time, or have some means to time lock the computer to the tape machine, impossible with a portastudio.

One way to do it, is if 2 tracks have say drums and bass on them, transfer this together. Then transfer the guitars and vocal. The drums and bass will be fine, you will have to work on the guitar by editing say at the start of each verse and or chorus to realign. The vocals are easy as you just need to align the lines of the vocal so they are in time due to vocals having gaps.

Alan.
 
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