Transferring Multitrack Reels Into Computer?

rob aylestone said:
200 posts and were just going around in circles, and the little dribbles of extra info just confuse things. Can I clear a few things in my head?

you have a fully working and silent daw system?
when you plug in the reel to reel, without playing a tape, but powered up, you hear a hum?

stop there. Fix this first. A hum that starts when you plug in the cable indicates that it is the presence of the cable that is the first problem. The later chat about adding extra ground cables is probably wrong, because your audio cables have connected r2r ground to the DAW ground already. Extra cables will possibly make it worse, not better. How many xlr inputs do you have? Not sure which interface it is? If it is 4, there is a simple solution. Make up some cables and feed the reel to reel audio in on pins 2 and 3, with no connection to pin 1, and use the differential inputs to remove ground paths. If you have just two inputs, it’s not going to work of course.

the other question relates to levels. This hum, how far down from maximum is it? A loud hum or a really quiet hum? Digital has such a wide range that it’s possible there isnt a problem, and you’re just turning it up too much. I assume though, it sounds like a problem hum, as in a something that needs fixing.

we’re all getting very confused with your problem now, too many little dribbles of info, and posts are being missed.
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I know what you mean. I thought this thread was maybe a couple of pages, only to discover upon looking for the model of tape machine how long it was.

And yes, we are going around in circles.

In my previous post regarding grounding the machine, that’s perfectly valid, and with the deck completely isolated from everything else, it would determine if there’s a problem with the deck itself.

Anyway I’m going to stay out from this point. It is getting like a merry go round :)
 
Hum is present also through the headphone jack, so it's there without hooking up to the interface.
There are 8 XLR inputs.
It's fairly quiet, but if I have to boost levels on some material, it's not (post #211 has a sample.)
 
The clip you posted - without a frame of reference, I can't tell if it's noisy or fine. Where would your 0dB VU reading be in relation to that background noise? That could be a lot of noise, or a very low amount of noise without the signal to compare it too?
 
rob aylestone said:
The clip you posted - without a frame of reference, I can't tell if it's noisy or fine. Where would your 0dB VU reading be in relation to that background noise? That could be a lot of noise, or a very low amount of noise without the signal to compare it too?
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Exactly what I was asking. You said it better for sure.

It is a simple issue and setup to diagnose and resolve if we were in person with bmg. It gets tangled and mixed the further it goes into this thread...
 
jimmys69 said:
Exactly what I was asking. You said it better for sure.
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Not better - we're just thinking the same real issue. I nearly jumped out of my skin today. I'd been working as normal, and I'm old AND old fashioned and my levels are usually done purely by ear. I know when the levels are right. Anyway - I came out of Cubase into Soundforge and when I pressed play the room took off. My grandson comes here and disappears into the studio, and despite him being 10, I just leave him to it, and he gets more adventurous. He'd been changing things and I'd spent about 4 hours on a project and had been working at a level, way, way down the meters and digital gives you so much leeway that with loads of extra gain dialed into the control room section I was recording as normal - but not realising the actual channel levels were really, really low. That clip of the recorder has some noise and some hum, but memory says all my analogue gear made noises. All that mattered was that it was recorded as hot as the gear allowed, and then hiss (my personal hate) wasn't an issue. We get clip after clip 'with problems' that often mean we all have to normalise the audio before we can listen to it. Sometimes I wonder what standards people newer to recording actually demand? No noise whatsoever seems the quest. We have people really upset by noises that are hardly problems.
 
Halfway into this project (about 35 reels transferred) and I'm pleasantly surprised at how good good some of the material sounds.
(Only 1 screw-up with Scotch Tape - the other 95% are Maxell.)

Teac was a godsend to the home recording market at that time.
Just ask this guy:
1.jpg
 
One thing I’m still unsure about is recording levels.
I’ve been working on a piece that is very long, and contains both quiet and loud passages.
I set the levels to avoid clipping when drums, percussion, etc. are present, but this has resulted in very low levels when playing back the track in reaper.
I have to have the mixer fader up all the way on playback to achieve any kind of reasonable levels.
I know this is not such a problem with digitals s/n ratio, but what I want to know is where would the extra dB come from (if needed) if I’m maxed out in this program?
 
If you are "maxed out" with the faders, then this would be a perfect situation for using normalization. The normalization process looks at the wave file and says "the highest peak is ... " say -11.5dB. That means you have plenty of headroom before you distort the signal, so it can raise everything by 11dB and still not exceed the 0dB ceiling. Now you have range on your fader to raise the level in necessary, like maybe after you add a compressor, or put a limiter on it. Your S/N ratio remains the same since the loudest peak and the lowest hiss remain RELATIVELY the same. If you noise was at -70 and the highest peak was -15, you have 55dB differential. Raise it by 15db and the peak is 0 and the noise floor is -55dB, still the same.

Think of it in terms of the bits of data. If you are only using 17 of the 24 bits at the highest peak, you can simply add 7 bits to every sample of the wave form on that track. Or add 6 bits to maintain some "headroom" if you want. Just don't add more than 7 bits, because that would give you a number that exceeds the max and truncates to 24.... DIGITAL DISTORTION.

You don't have to boost all the tracks, if one is slightly lower than you want relative to it's companion tracks, you can just raise that track. If you have a stereo track and you want to maintain the balance, you can boost the two tracks the same amount. The program will look at both tracks. pick the highest level and raise both by that amount equally.
 
Something else to consider if you have a long piece with both quiet and loud parts, you can still "ride the faders" like you might have done in the old days. This is called automation in the digital realm. This would be an example. Say at the end of this track I needed to boost the final section and then fade out... it would look something like this:
Automated volume.jpg
In this case, I boosted the track by 3.46dB, and then faded it down at the end. You can be so precise that if you had a noise spike, you could set the point immediately before the spike, cut the volume at the middle of the peak, and raise it back after the peak goes through. I did this on a couple of records that I transferred. There was a slight scratch for a few revolutions, so I could notch out each click for the 4 or 5 revolutions that the click was heard.
 
OK - thanks - a lot of info.
(Haven't learned how to use the envelope function yet.)
Just yesterday, I noticed an electrical 'click' on one of the songs, so maybe this would be a good way to eradicate it.
 
I may have read you question wrong, but the faders are to set relative levels between tracks. If you want more volume, turn up your monitors.

If you transfer the tracks at a level that they won't clip during percussive parts, then all the tracks should be at the same relative volume that they were on the tape. If that wasn't problematic at the time, it shouldn't be now.

If you are transferring mixed songs and the dynamic range is too high, the mastering process tends to take care of that.
 
I suspect it might be more effective to turn up your monitors and turn down the loud parts of the tracks

Another approach is to automate take volume. (I'm assuming you're using Reaper. Take volume is often called clip gain in other software.) It's similar to automating track volume, but it's upstream of the track effects, and it only applies to a given take. To do this you double click on the take (a chunk of audio), click the Take envelopes button and select Volume. Then you can automate volume changes inside the selected bit of audio, and it will be reflected in the displayed waveform.

Another method is to split the take up into sections and normalize each section separately, then crossfade them to transition between sections.
 
Well, the first part of the project is done (90+ tapes) and not too soon, as the 3440 gave up the ghost these last few days.
Second phase is obtaining an 80-8, or equivalent, and diving into the 8-track archive.

(Not looking forward to it, as no amount of baking seems to cure my Ampex tapes of SSS, for some reason.)
 
Hey BMG, I am a little late to the party but I'm a new-ish member. I had good success transferring 4 and 8 track tape from my old Teac 2340 and Tascam 388 to Reaper via my 16 channel firewire mixer. I did jack up one recording by having the levels too hot but other than that everything sounded great once digitized. I was then able to use some of my plugins to freshen up the tracks and reduce noise that was present on the original recordings.
 
Good for you - I'm dealing with tapes that are about 30-40 years old, and it's been quite a challenge.
I guess it depends on how old and which tapes were used originally.
Maxell are perfect - no issues whatsoever - Ampex is on the other end of the spectrum.
Unfortunately, all my 8-track material is on 456.
 
I had tapes from the late 70's though 90's so my tapes were very old. All of my recordings were on Maxell tape but even those were breaking down after 30 to 40 years. I was lucky to get my transfers done when the tapes were still in good shape. I didn't have as much luck when I transferred my dad's old 8mm home movies to digital. Those tapes were in really bad shape.
 
My dad had his old 8mm film transferred at a local shop years ago. They were put on VHS tape. Of course few people still have VHS decks that work. I had two dead ones, but found one still working, so I copied everything to digital about 3 years ago. They are now on both DVD and MP4 format so, hopefully they won't be lost.

I have several of his old reels of tape from the 50s and 60s, but I haven't gotten around to trying to transfer them. Hopefully my brother's old Sony deck will fire up when I get to that point.

It's a bit funny hearing about all the problems with tape (sticky shed especially) after all the arguments years ago saying that digital was a bad way back up audio data, since it could be corrupted and standards could change. Tape was nice and permanent! Well, who'd have thunk it!?
 
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