Advice Needed for Archiving ADAT to DAW

[drliebs]

I have a bunch of old ADAT tapes I recorded with my friends in college. There are about 6 sessions on 16 to 32 tracks of ADAT. I am considering buying a used ADAT to try to archive the audio to the computer. These recordings are from 1994-1996, but they have been stored in a box in my air conditioned house. What is the chance they will play back? (The old DAT masters I tried are full of errors.)

What techniques can I use to synchronize playback to my DAW as I don't have enough inputs to dump them in one pass? I have a Tascam US428 with 4 analog and 2 SPDIF inputs. Any thoughts?

[kslight]

Me personally I would suggest calling around local studios or posting an ad on Craigslist or TOMB requesting ADAT transfers rather than buy a machine...because you could buy a machine and have it not read your tapes and you may or may not be able to tell whether the problem is the machine or your tapes without trying several. Plus a studio or someone on here is likely to have enough inputs to able to do this sufficiently without having to reassemble from bits and pieces.

That said considering the age of your ADATs I would say you are lucky if they do work...I don't recall ADATs having a shelf-life over 5 years. At work people that were employed before me archived data (not audio) to DAT tapes for whatever reason between 2002 and 2006, and consequently when we go back to these tapes for one of these jobs its a crapshoot as to whether they will actually work or not. Not to mention that the DAT drives themselves are quite antiquated and sometimes tough to get working, I have to imagine that ADATs are similar.

[kingmetal]

I did something like this with a MOTU 828MKII and Reaper. Cubase would work as well. Most MOTU interfaces in the MKII range had an ADAT SYNC port and I just had my daw chase the ADAT. The ADAT SYNC cable is a 9-pin serial cable with extra shielding I believe.

You could also do it with a BRC and MTC I think...

[Waltz Mastering]

Adats were never the most stable format.. The reason for the errors could be the machines heads are dirty. If they're real bad you would get an error #7. There were different decks. The 20 bit Lx 20's were popular. I still have three. can't remember the last time they were used though. I think you can buy a machine for around $150 .

[mertmo]

I still use my blackface ADATs all the time, and I still reformat and use my old mid
90's tapes. I have yet to have a single problem doing that, or even pulling up an
old tape for transfer. Hell, I've even busted out tapes very recently and just done
straight up remixes, not even transfers. Zero problems. Okay, lemme be honest:
Late 90's, not mid 90's. Most of what I've pulled up lately was from 98 to 2003ish.
And all my tape is Ampex/Quantegy. If your stuff is on HHB tapes, god help you.

I'm probably insanely lucky. My blackface machines have always been crazy stable
and reliable. Go figure. I do always store my tapes inside a climate controlled
building.

As far as getting them all to sync up later in the DAW... The only reliable method
I can think of is to slate all the tapes at once with a pulse from a click track or
similar. That means having multiple decks playing in sync, and recording your
slate to one track on each deck in the same moment. I've had success with just
one pulse at the beginning of a whole tape, and the different 8 track segments lined
up perfectly for the length of the whole tape. But that's going for a pure all digital
transfer.

Good luck, I bet it will be fun to hear that stuff regardless of how you manage the
transfer!

[Circuit Scream]

I just did this last year with tapes about the same age. I luckily have a friend who owned an ADAT edit PCI card, and he loaned me the card to use in my powermac 8600.

I bought a single blackface deck on ebay for around $200 and did the transfers. It was extremely simple, but tedious - it took me FOREVER because I could only transfer 1 track at a time (my hard disk on that mac is slow). Captured the tracks to ADAT edit and saved as WAV files, then just lined them up in Sonar.

[EDIT] - to make this work without lining them up manually I had to set the in point the same for each track - I didn't worry about the out point at all.

But the results were great. I gave my friend the ADAT deck when I was done.

[drliebs]

I just bought a used ADAT for $130 including shipping. We'll see what "works great" really means. And then of course, here's to hoping my tapes playback!

I think I will try punching in a test tone on all 8 tracks before the beginning of a song. Hopefully with the punch point set all of the tapes will have the test tone in the same place. I can do this on all of the tapes (9-32) and line then up in the daw. I will be recording 4 tracks at a time.

It's just a bunch of tunes I wrote with my band back in the 90's and I think it will be fun to give them a proper mix before I toss all of the old adat tapes and archive them to DVD.

Thanks for the replies everyone!