Topic: Tascam DA-88 multitrack questions...

[Fatah Ruark (aka MIKE B)]

So, I used to go see Agents of Good Roots quite a bit when I lived on the east coast, and they used to record most of their shows at the time with 3 Tascam DA-88's (total of 24 tracks, of which they used around 20).

Lets say I could get my hands on the tapes, what would I need to do to mix these.

I would like to feed them into Wavelab (or some other windows program) and mix them on my computer (seems to be the easiest way to do this).

I figure I would need at least one DA-88. What else would I need?

Can I feed each track into Wavelab individually and still keep them synced up? Or would I need some fancy 8 track soundcard to keep the tracks synced?

Also is this something I could figure out fairly easily?

Just an idea. I would love to play with something like this. Sounds like a lot of fun.

Any ideas, reading I should do, software to use, etc?

Thanks,
MIKE B

[Chris K]

you may want to look at getting a motu 2408 which can do 24 channels of TDIF (DA-38/88) or ADAT:

http://www.motu.com/products/pciaudio/2408/body.html/en

edit to add:
they are in the third generation, you can get the mkII cheap off ebay or old stock.

i used to play in a band with this guy who had the original 2408 hooked into an early g4 mac. he had the 2408/mac and i had 2 adat xt's. it worked very well. i have wanted to get one for a while but never pulledd the trigger.

[blastroknow]

You would have to get at least 1 TASCAM DA series machine and preferably a TDIF input card for your computer and if it is just going to be a one time transfer thing renting a DA88 that is in great shape is the best way to go {because it is still a HI 8 VCR at heart}.  If you get the TDIF card you can dump 8 trks at a time so transfer your 3 tapes and then line them up in your multitrack editor to mix them all down.  A much more tedious route would be no TDIF card and dump 2 tracks at a time and still line them all up manually.

That is a project for sure but easily doable on a desktop computer - I'm not familiar with Wavelab but as long as it has multitrack capability it will work.  Vegas and Sonar are the 2 tools I use for that sort of thing - they all do the same thing.