Viable tape to digital sync options?

[BRDTS]

What sort of sync experiences do people have in linking up a Tascam TSR-8 to a DAW, regardless of which is acting as the master?

Works great.

Farm #1
Nuendo/Cubase....Three Layla 3gs word clocked together with master word clock (and wc cable) going to an old MOTU Digital Timepiece as entire system master clock hub (which also feed farms 2 and 3)

smpte out of the Digital Timepiece feeds daw and either the Midiizer or ATS500 synchronizers or both. Acc2 cables from those then feed the TSR8 (or 8516b) ... and shortly via if1000/if500... will feed an atr8024 (yipee). Smpte out of the machine synchronizers is also routed to the Timepiece for when the analog machines are masters to the daw.

tsr8 (or the other multitracks) can now be master or slave to the entire system by simply setting the master setup from the daw and Timepiece.

Works great all the time. No hiccups that I've ever encountered. Lock via Timepiece is tight and reliable at both the daw and tape machines sides. No preference for who the master is.

 

[Beck]

I’ve been away from the forum and busy, so just real quickly here is an answer to the OP about the specific setup involved and I’ll come back later for further discussion:

Hi Beck,

The machine that I have is a Tascam TSR-8.

As for DAW hardware, my interface card is an Echo Layla 24/96 (antiquated, perhaps, but it still runs like a champ on my new Windows 7-based machine and I haven't seen any reason to upgrade it yet). The software I'm running is both Adobe Audition 2.0 and Cubase LE 4 (I don't believe that Audition supports sync options, but I'm pretty sure Cubase LE 4 does...though if I need to find a different piece of software to do this, I will).

You’re setup closely resembles mine… TSR-8, Echo Layla24 and Cool Edit Pro, Which is what Audition was before Adobe bought it from Syntrillium. The Layla is an excellent interface. If anything, many interfaces at that level have become more cheaply made and less capable over the years. It’s also rock solid when following SMPTE/MTC sync, which is another reason to like it. Sync is setup in the Layla control software and is capable of acting as master or slave via SMPTE/MTC. Adobe Audition supports MTC.

I use the TSR-8 as master and the DAW follows flawlessly. Controlling the Layla with the TSR-8 is a very simple matter and no special cables or expensive interfaces are needed. An inexpensive sync box like the JL Cooper PPS-2 or even the original PPS-1 does the trick and you only need standard 5-pin MIDI cables to go from the sync box to the Layla.

MTC does NOT control the system timing at the A/D converter stage, but internally after the ADC.

Bottom line is the OP of this thread has the right combination of equipment to setup the TSR-8 as master and Layla24 to follow MTC for best results in this case.

Not all DAWs are created equal when it comes to MTC synchronization. Some hardware/software doesn’t work as well as others, so either approach to synchronization is valid, but depends on what one owns. That being said, if I had a DAW interface with poor MIDI/MTC implementation I would replace it with something else.

The first two generation Laylas work very well and have two adjustments in the software you can fine-tune if needed for MTC.

I'll address the broader issue later, but just a hint... when a tape machine is slaved to an external device, either another tape machine or a DAW via SMPTE, for starters the wow & flutter is easily doubled at minimum. It's a lot more problematic than that so I'll elaborate later.

 

[troutmask]

Thanks for the feedback, BRDTS and Beck.

From what I'm gathering from Beck's post, if I use a box like the JL Cooper PPS-1 or PPS-2, I don't even need to use one of the Tascam converter boxes, as BRDTS is.

One more question...and I imagine this is a dumb question, but I'll ask it anyway...part of my reason for going with this setup is so that I do not have to bounce tracks on tape and can use multiple tapes (when necessary) for overdubs. So if the tape machine is the master in this setup, and if I want to move to a second tape for additional overdubs, what do I need to do? Obviously the new tape will not have the same timecode signal on it as the first master did, so would I just re-stripe the new tape with the signal from the DAW?

Thanks.

 

[jpmorris]

AFAIK the Cooper boxes can only slave a computer from a master tape deck. For a secondary slave deck, you will have to have striped the tape with timecode, and you will have to use an ATS500 or similar to slave it to the master machine. You'll want a signal splitter (or a passthrough from the Cooper if it has one) to feed into the ATS box, so both of them get the master timecode.


EDIT:
Oh, do you mean you want to bounce back from the DAW to a fresh tape using a single machine? In that case you'll want to stripe the tape first, slave the DAW as before, and simply record to appropriate tracks on the new tape.

I have a feeling I'm missing something in your question.

 

[miroslav]

So if the tape machine is the master in this setup, and if I want to move to a second tape for additional overdubs, what do I need to do? Obviously the new tape will not have the same timecode signal on it as the first master did, so would I just re-stripe the new tape with the signal from the DAW?

1.) Use the same spool of tape after you dump. I do this with everything, and I don't get hung up about "archiving" the original tape tracks. I mean, I'll save the last bunch of tracks that are on the tape and not use that portion of the tape for other songs, but my real "archive" of all the tracks is what is in the DAW. Yeah, you can consider that "one day" you may(???) want to remix from scratch, going back to the original tape tracks....but few folks ever really do that, unless you're a major artist and want to release a new "remix" at some point to boost record sales.
So...unless you want to eat up a lot of tape, record on the same portion and keep dumping to DAW, otherwise use # 2.) below.

2.) Stripe another tape, and then let it lock to the DAW, and then record from the proper starting point. If your song starts at 00:03:00:00...then on the new striped tape, you will begin your new tracks at 00:03:00:00 *while locked to DAW* (at least for the first couple of tracks). If you don't want to stay locked to the DAW while tracking the second real, on the first pass, dump a rough cue mix to one tape track from the DAW *while locked to DAW*...then you can just use the deck to finish out the reel without the DAW, but you then eat up (2) tracks, one for SMPTE and one for cue.
Mind you, once you start doing it this way will end up with 2, 3 maybe 4 reels each with a few tracks for each song....but none of the reels will be all used up. So, for your next song, you have to juggle through all those reels, maintaining that same kind of process and keeping everything clearly notated for future use...could get messy.

 

[troutmask]

Miroslav, I assume you're talking about striping track 8 of an entire tape with timecode. I guess my major question is -- do I really have to do this? Why can't I just stripe however much I need, insert a splice, and stripe another portion of the reel when I'm ready to overdub?

So, I'm reading through the PPS-2 manual and the comments you guys have made, and this is the process I'm arriving at.

1) Stripe an audio track of the DAW with SMPTE tones (as a 'control' track)
2) Record those same tones direct from the DAW to track 8 of the TSR-8
3) Record tracks 1-7 on tape as normal
4) When it comes time to record additional tracks, splice in some leader tape after the end of the initial multi-track (just as a place marker), stripe track 8 on the new section of tape with the SMPTE audio from the DAW, etc.

From reading through this, it looks like I'm still making the DAW the master in this process, but only for printing the SMPTE to tape. I'm still planning on running the DAW as a slave elsewhere.

Will this work?

 

[jpmorris]

I do it that way, actually. I leave a gap of about 10 seconds between each song and stripe again starting from 0. Otherwise I'd have to mess around with offsets and the like in the sequencer.

The only time it can be a problem is if you're slaving the deck, and it overshoots into part of the other song. That can get a bit messy, but it doesn't happen much.

 

[miroslav]

Miroslav, I assume you're talking about striping track 8 of an entire tape with timecode. I guess my major question is -- do I really have to do this?

You don't have to....it's just how I've been doing it for over 20 years now. I stripe the entire tape.
I hardly ever cut/spliced up a reel.
If I was mixing a stereo master from/to tape...then it would make sense to splice in paper leader between songs, but for dumping to DAW, I don't understand why the need to splice tape, it just ruins the whole reel...???

Yeah, each song will have a specifc start point, so you have to punch that offset into the DAW...but that's nothing complicated...takes about 5 seconds, just pick a starting point. I mean, that's the great thing about SMPTE, there's no need to always start everything at 00:00:00:00...but, I guess everyone has their way of working.

Oh...not sure about your DAW, but is it actually outputing LTC SMPTE....or MTC?

 

[troutmask]

Thanks again for the feedback, everyone. I ended up picking up a JL Cooper PPS-2, and I'm looking forward to really digging in to some serious tape work with it.