Cakewalk Forum

I have several old 4 track projects recorded on a Tascam 4 track cassette deck. What's the best way to transfer these to Sonar (V2.2) for digital editing purposes? If I transfer them one track at a time, will they be easy to sync up in Sonar. Any suggestions are welcome.

Barry

Do they need to be seperate tracks? If they don't simply run a stereo rca - 1/8" mini into your soundcard and go.

If they need to be seperate tracks, I would find a fried that has a MOTU 828 (or something similar) and send all four tracks in at once (assigned to seperate tracks. That would be the best way.

Otherwise using your four tracks counter and cakewalk's drag function should not be all that difficult. May take a while longer though.

Good Luck!

I have lots of time. Thanx for the tips.

b

You can actually record more than one track at once by using both the line in and the mic in at the same time. Use the external controls to optimise your recording levels. It might speed things up a bit.

There will be sonic quality differences if you use different inputs on your soundcard ie- line in vs. mic in, so you should transfer the tracks 1 at a time to your computer, preferably using line in as it is usually not a noisy. Before you do that though, you should record a series of percusive sounds to all 4 tracks just before or just after your material and when you copy each track to computer make sure you include those sounds you just recorded, you will be able to re-sync your 4 tracks in Sonar by zooming in to those percusive sounds and making sure they line up perfectly.

Have fun

Sur

Surreal,
Providing he pans the signals hard left and hard right, selcts the right ports and checks his levels (as Andy suggested) he shouldn't run into an issue. Good tip about always checking levels though.

Thanx to all who have helped with this. It worked like a charm.

B

Great to hear it! Care to share what you did?

Honest to God, what I do is for my own personal amusement and not good enuff for "outside" ears. I can barely stand it when my wife wants to listen to a finished tune. Maybe some day...

Well, what method did you find worked best for transferring your tapes?

Barrymac wrote:Honest to God, what I do is for my own personal amusement and not good enuff for "outside" ears. I can barely stand it when my wife wants to listen to a finished tune. Maybe some day...

Don't be ashamed. If anyone gives you a hard time just ignore it. Most people would give you constructive feed back on you tracks and this would help you to progress further and faster. I certainly found that anyway.

I used the "track-at-a-time" method. My Tascam porta-studio has an rca out for each of the 4 trax, and i sent them, one at a time, thru my M-Audio 2496 USB to separate audio trax in Sonar. I added a 4 beat count-in to EACH of the tascam trax. It still took a bit of tweaking in Sonar to match them up, but not much.

I know I shouldn't be self-concious about my music, but it's difficult to let it go. If you can suggest a way to share it, I'll think aboot it.

Barry,
I was more interested in the method you used. I think you misunderstood me.

If you want to share your music, just stick it up on some server space (most ips give a few megs to each customer) and post a link here.

Good luck!

ive had to do similar things and using an audio interface(if u have) is quick

Well I'm so happy you all are having suck great luck syncing your 4 tracks perfectly into Cakewalk.....Besides splitting and moving over and over and over again...can one use audio snap...or something???

I use the 4 track at practice then bring it home to off load the sweet music. Which is fine....but I want and need to do a little eq'ing here and there without changing this or that and I can't without having 4 seperate tracks. I wonder why I can't just goto the end of the song...listen for a snare crack, sync it to the bass track {or whatever} goto the begining...and it should be fine. But guess what? It ain't! Help Needed here!!