Premastering Problem - Tascam 2488 Portastudio

[ccxxprod]

Recorded 14 songs on the Tascam 2488 Portastudio over the last 10 months. After each was complete, did a mix and premastered it in order to burn a CD. On about five of the songs, I came back to them months later and did some different mixes (each song has six or more tracks). On three of the songs, I had no problem premastering them again after making my mix changes. However, on the other two, the premastering won't take! In fact, what happened is that after running through the premastering process, not only did the new mixes not take, it wiped out the old premaster mix and I'm just left with the tracks as they were before I ever did any mixing at all.

So, basically I'm now left with two songs that I can't premaster after applying any mix on them. Note: I do have backups of these songs on my laptop and dumped them to the Tascam but the same thing happened. I tried moving the songs to a different partition; same thing.

What is it with these two songs? Anyone run into this before and how did you solve it?

Thank you.

 

[RAMI]

Never heard of that problem. What do you mean by "they won't take"?

As far as it wiping out the old pre-master, just "Un-do" the new pre-master and it should put the other one back.

Are you sure your OUT point is at the end of the song? Did you press RECORD and PLAY when you pre-mastered, or just PLAY?

Just throwing those questions out there because sometimes we over-look the most obvious things.

 

[ccxxprod]

Thanks for the reply, RAMI. What I mean by "won't take" is that after doing the desired mix, setting the out point, getting into premastering mode, and pressing RECORD and then PLAY, the mix isn't there when it's done. In other words, after doing the premaster and playing it back, none of the mix has taken affect.

The out point is at the end of the songs.

I've made sure that RECORD is pushed first and then PLAY (as described in the manual). The record LED is red, so I know it's supposed to be recording.

I'll try the Un-do function and hope it brings back the previous premaster.

It's only on these two (2) songs. I'm wondering if these songs could be damaged in some way. I don't know. It bums me out thinking that I may no longer be able to do other mixes on these two (2) songs. I've done enough of these over the past 10 months to know that I'm doing it correctly, which has me worried that the songs may be damaged in some way. Another thing that makes me think this is that I copied these two (2) songs to another partition and had the same problem.

If you can think of anything else, please let me know.

Thank you.

 

[RAMI]

That is a weird problem. If it happened to all your songs, I'd suspect that you might be doing something wrong. But since it's only 2 of your songs, you're obviously doing everything right.

I once had a problem with a glitch on a track with my 788, before I had the 2488, and it turned out that it just happened to be a glitch in that part of the hard-drive. I had to re-format. But I've never had or heard of that problem with the 2488.

The only thing I can suggest is that, instead of going into Pre-master mode, just do a bounce to 2 empty track while you mix. It's the same thing really because after doing a pre-master you have to transfer the pre-master to 2 empty tracks anyway, if you want to export those tracks. So, assuling you have 2 free tracks (23 and 24, for example), just do a bounce to those 2 tracks while mixing.

I hope this helps and I hope you figure it out.

 

[ccxxprod]

Thanks, RAMI.

You mentioned bouncing tracks and that made me think of something I did to those two songs that I didn't do to the others. I cloned some of tracks to other tracks and then cleaned out the original tracks (e.g. cloned track 4 to track 2 and then cleaned out track 4). I'm wondering if this did something goofy.