How To: Replace an 8-Track R2R with a Laptop

[joninc]

It is a common practice to record audio onto a different drive than the one your daw and apps run off of. Could be internal in a tower like mine or external.

[I'm Painting Again]

I have a basic analog setup with a Tascam 38 8-track reel-to-reel and a Tascam M-308 mixer.

What gear would I need to effectively replace an 8-track tape machine with a laptop in this scenario? (i.e. leaving the analog board and outboard gear for all the recording/mixing, essentially just using the laptop/DAW as a recorder?).

I know it would be easy to send a stereo mix to to the laptop, but I want to have the same experience that I get with my 8-track analog setup where each of the 8 tracks would be separately sent from/received by the mixer (and I wouldn't have to look at a screen).

While you can replace the function of your 38 - that is use a computer instead as the recording medium - it's not really going to sound the same

I suggest trying it out before you commit of you haven't/don't know for sure what it does

you know digital takes away the sound of the tascam itself and that might be something you don't like

on a tascam vs. mid fi computer interface my opinion is that I' might ake the interface for Jazz and Classical and the tascam for everything else

unless your looking to get like a pinnacle of 1970's hi-fi rock/pop album sound then *maybe* I'd go with the computer and figure out how to simulate all the qualities of that sound with outboard and plug-ins as best as possible

you can keep the tascam around and track right through it to the interface as well - so you get the sound of the deck and ability to edit on the computer

If you're wanting to mix from and to a computer at the same time with 8 tracks you'll need an interface with 10 assignable ins and outs - the extra pair of ins for recording stereo mix back in and the extra pair of outs to monitor

another thing to look out for is the connections - the tascam stuff is usually -10 unbalanced so an interface that can play nice with that type of signal would be optimal

[vvv]

FWIW, I stripped an XP Pro home macheen to just the OS (what I stripped as much as I could, simplified the video driver, turned off the network stuff and eye-candy, etc.) and the DAW (Cool Edit Pro 2.1) and a PDF reader and another cuppla DAW progs (Audacity, etc.) left on the 7200rpm 500gig SATA.

Then I put a another 7200 (mebbe a 750gig? not in front of me right now) drive to record onto. I felt like that increased the old rig's speed by a good third.

Then I went from 2 to 4gig memory, and that increased speed and stabilized the system as well.

I use USB 2.0 drives to back up onto when I'm done recording, by the album. With 2-3 album's total raw tracks on the recording drive, and frequent targeted de-frag, I find the speeds for overdubbing (2 tracks at a time) and multi-track mixdown (say, 32 tracks, +/-) acceptable.

And a lot cheaper than a new pooter.

But yeah, don't track to the OS disc like Nick said because of wear and speed, and also because of fragmentation (at least re WinXP).

[digitaldrummer]

I'll preface this by saying that I have a day job, and it has involved working with development teams that make hard drives and SSDs and I've been doing it way too long... so you can agree or disagree with me and I still won't care.

I prefer to have my OS drive separate, and record to a second drive, but recently went back to recording on the "C" drive because Win10 was issuing timeouts with my SSDs (search the web; its been going on for a long time with Win10), but the SSD is more than fast enough for my needs - and quiet. So it works fine with one drive. I'm not worried about wearing it out and the monitoring software (which shows life) says I am nowhere close.

Let's start with hard drives (the kind with spinning mechanical disks). Reading (playback) or writing (recording) is actually pretty easy (and optimal) for most disks. Check the "sequential read/write" or bandwidth specs on a drive to see what they are capable of (then compare that to SSDs!). 5400 rpm disks will be much lower than 7200 or 10K rpm disks. I've been able to record 16 tracks to an old laptop with WinXP and a 5400rpm HDD, but I would not expect to get any performance out of it for mixing or editing. Worked fine as a tape recorder though. When you start doing a lot of small edits, it may cause your drive to move the heads around (random I/O), then that puts more mechanical stress on the drive. How quickly you wear out your drive depends on what kind of drive you have and what you are doing with it. but most hard drives measure life in power on hours because its got moving parts.

Modern solid state drives usually have much higher read and write capability - both for recording (sequential) and editing (random). They are quiet - no moving parts! They are getting cheaper (I saw Fry's selling a 500GB WD Blue for $90 today). But SSDs wear-out is measured by how many times you write (or reprogram) the NAND Flash memory. Drives like the one I just mentioned do not expect to have you writing (recording) 24x7. In fact they expect to read data a LOT more than they write. They are good for booting your OS, and if you have an older system, you will probably notice a huge performance difference just by replacing your boot HDD with an SSD. The drive that i use for booting and recording is rated for more writes (usually measured in lifetime TeraBytes written, or sometimes as full Drive Writes per day). So if you get a drive that is 500GB and rated for 1 drive write per day, then you can expect to fill the drive every day (500GB of new tracks) until the warranty period expires. if your drive is 1TB and you still record 500GB a day, then in theory it will last twice as long. a 24/96Khz track is about 34.56MB per minute (or 2.074GB per hr). If you are recording 16 tracks, then you could be writing 553MB per minute -- note the drive performance spec will be MB per second - so that is <10MB/sec for 16 tracks. No problem for most modern drives, and wear-out at that rate? Maybe not...

anyway, enough of that... but the "rules" may be changing.

[vvv]

I'm inna bidness where computers are de rigueur, but the main use is probably word-processing, followed by porn-wartching.

In the event, those who converted to SSD's for the OS rave about 'em, and with the expense going down more and more use 'em for the data, also.

And rave about 'em.

I believe fragmentation is not an issue with SSD's? I don't know, but was so told.

Me, I'm still using XP Pro, so ...

[digitaldrummer]

I believe fragmentation is not an issue with SSD's? I don't know, but was so told.

That is true (as long as the drive remains online long enough for certain background operations to occur - that can sometimes mean 24 hrs depending on the drive).