Porta07 to DAW - Help!

casual-walt

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Tascam 07
Hello there,

I have a load of tapes I recorded on a Tascam Porta07 that I am trying to get onto my Roland VS-CD2000 -

I am trying to record each individual track by itself at the same time onto the Roland, but as the Porta07 doesn't have 4 of the same outputs I am struggling to figure out how.

Does anyone have any remedy for this situation ? Any advice would be very much appreciated!

All the best folks,
w
 
Hi Walt and welcome to the forum. I'm not familiar with either machine so there's a lot of assumptions in the following, but if it helps...
If the Porta-07 does not have separate tape-outputs for each track, you may be able to use the various left/right/aux/send outputs to route/pan each track to a unique output, and transfer all 4 tracks in a single pass. The block diagram may help to see the options available.

If not, you'll need another way of synchronising the tracks. Assuming there is no dedicated sync output which can control the Roland recorder, you could manually record a short pulse/blip or any short transient sound onto each track of the Porta-07 before transferring them. It obviously has to be at exactly the same time on all tracks, so this would only be useful if you can arm all tracks and record the pulse to all 4 in one short record pass.
If there are a few seconds before the music starts on each track, you could do this at/near the beginning, but if there's any risk of overrunning into the music, it might be better to record the pulse after all tracks have finished.

You can then transfer each track one at a time, and then time-shift the tracks on the Roland to line up the pulses. This assumes the Roland can time-shift. If not, you may have to transfer them to a DAW and do the alignment there.

Either way, this sync method only lines up the tracks at that point in time; it will not compensate for any drift between the two machines. You may be lucky and find the drift is unnoticeable, but if not, you may have to do further time shifts on smaller sections of each track to keep them aligned.
Good luck.

Update: you could also do a combination of the above, e.g. you should easily be able to transfer 2 tracks at a time in sync by routing one track left and another right, and connecting left & right outputs to 2 separate inputs on the Roland. You still need to record the pulse, but you would then just need half the effort to time-align the 2 pairs of sync'd tracks.
If you can route the 3rd track to the aux send, you've then got 3 already sync'd, but you'd still need to time-align the 4th.
Whichever method you use, make sure you disable all EQ & FX on the Porta-07 assuming you want to transfer the raw tracks so you can add EQ & FX at the Roland end.
 
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