8 track reel to reel synced up with an 8 in soundcard

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JustinHedrick
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8 track reel to reel synced up with an 8 in soundcard

Post by JustinHedrick » Wed Nov 09, 2005 11:41 am

hello,

i want to integrate an 8 track reel to reel (for tracking live drums) with my 8 in soundcard (for tracking guitar, bass, ect. can this be done? I want to hopefully be able to use it all at the same time. any ideas?

justin

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bannerj
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Post by bannerj » Wed Nov 09, 2005 12:30 pm

I am just now trying to do this myself. You need a SMPTE box to read and write SMPTE on one of your analog tracks. You will then get 7 analog and 8 digital. Then you have to slave the DAW to your tape machine. j.l. cooper has a box that will read SMPTE as midi. Your DAW will then read the midi and slave that way.....I think that is what I should be able to do when I can sit down and give it a try.

JustinHedrick
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Post by JustinHedrick » Wed Nov 09, 2005 1:12 pm

so the SMPTE box is connected to my digital soundcard via the midi jack?
also, does this reduce the need to sync up the tracks manually?

justin

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linus
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Post by linus » Wed Nov 09, 2005 2:11 pm

Do you understand the terms master and slave when it comes to syncing gear? (No jokes please...)

Basicly the reel to reel deck will be the master. You'll have 7 channels you can record and playback. One of the tracks (use track 1 or 8 ) will be striped with smpte. Basicly the JL Cooper box will produce an audio tone (sounds like a modem) that you record (stripe) on that track. Then when you playback that track back into the JL Cooper box it will convert it to MTC (midi time code) and the midi output of the JL Cooper will go to the MIDI in of your computer. Your DAW will be the slave. In otherwords it will lock up timewise with the tapedeck.

Your tapedeck is NOT perfectly consistant in speed (remember wow and flutter?). So the computer will speed up and slow down as needed to keep locked up with the tapedeck. It will make these adjustments many times per second (I think 30 times per second is typical). This is so frequent that you won't hear it happening. However if you record some of the drums on tape and some on the DAW then rewind the tapedeck to dump the drums (recorded on tape) into the DAW the drum tracks recorded in the DAW in real time will be out of sync with the ones you dumped in on your second pass. When I say out of sync I mean by microseconds (the number of microseconds will vary as the DAW adjusts itself to the wow and flutter of the tape deck) but it will be enough that you will hear weird phasing stuff going on.

No big deal, just make sure that the stuff you record to tape is ONLY recorded to tape then dumped in.

Did you use the search function looking for: sync, master, slave, smpte ? If not, do so now as I'm sure lots of other posts have addressed this.

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