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more clarification... |
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Board Message |
more clarification... |
[ Follow Ups ] [ Post Followup ] [ The Recording Website Message Board ] [ FAQ ] Posted by JC on June 08, 2000 at 12:02:47:
In Reply to: Sorry.... posted by Steve S. on June 08, 2000 at 10:11:44:
It still would work, even when transferring one track at a time!
The tracks will not automatically line up, becasue you can not possibly be sure that every time you press "play" that the tape starts in the same place- you can come close by setting a locate time, then chasing to the locate time with "play" standing by. That'll take care of the ADAT starting in the right place, but the computer will *still* need to be started manually. This results in slop between one track and the next. The same thing would happen if you tried transferring multiple tracks to any medium, without sync there is no way to avoid it. But at least with a DAW you *can* re-align the tracks in time.
The procedure is VERY hard to do without a slate in the beginning: without the slate you're basically aligning the tracks by ear. Now, i've successfully done this before but it wasn't easy: for example, I listened to the bleed from the headphones in the singer's tracks- in between verses- to line his track up with the drums. Guitars and bass are much harder and almost nearly subjective, so you have to be really careful and understand that you might actually alter the original performance's timing if you're not careful. All in all lining up by hand SUCKS and I don't reccomend it.
With a slate in the beginning, it's easy. The slate should be recorded from the same sound source, to all tracks simultaneously. I generated a 1500 hz beep- actually a beep-beep-beep- beeeeeeeep- for this purpose. You can use anything though, as long as the attack is fairly fast- like a stick click, somebody tapping a mic, anything.
When I line up tracks this way, I zoom into the waveform as closely as I can and drop a marker or put my cursor at the start of the waveform- where zero crossing begins to rise or dip. I make a note of this time. Then I do the same for the track i'm trying to sync to. I adjust one or the other to match (using the multitrack's "track offset" feature) the first- so that the first zero crossing on my waveform is at the same time on every track. Naturally, if you moved four tracks at a time, then whatever offset you figure you need for one track will apply to all the tracks that were transferred with that one. Honestly, reading back over this it sounds very complicated but it isn't. Just remember that with ANY digital source, once you line up one spot all the rest will match, because unlike analog, with digital "time" remains constant.
So naturally, if you tried to line up ADAT tracks by hand and didn't use the offset (which only starts the .wav playback earlier or later), but rather used a timestretch or time compression to make the track lengths agree, you could see how the tracks would NEVER line up! Because the compression or stretching will change the one thing that IS constant with digital- TIME!
With analog, like I said, there is no time refrence whatsoever, therefore from one playback to the next TIME is not constant becuase there is no timing refrence. With digital, which has an inherant timing refrence, TIME ALWAYS remains an unchanging constant.
Hope this helps! I'll be glad to elaborate if anyone is confused by any of this... it sure does look confusing. All I can say is, try it once and you'll see it's not as bad as it seems.