Sync Clock Conundrum: Need to fix some tracks that were recorded with an ADAT *SOLVED*

Hi, guys. Hope you've all been well. I've got a problem I'm hoping I could get some ideas about. I've got a series of tracks that were recorded with an ancient version of Nuendo and an ADAT machine. I no longer have access to the ADAT. When I listen back to the tracks they are slow and low pitched. I think this is because the DAW was using the ADAT's clock. So I'm just wondering about possible ways to correct this either in Nuendo or X2. Am I stuck with time stretch/pitch shift?

Thanks.

the only time id use an adta's clock would be to sync-ing it with other adats, one of my friends still swears by mixing down onto adat, says he likes it better than running **** through an interface, and back into the DAW lol

lol... Yeah I'm not sure why the guy did things the way he did. He had a couple other quirky habits too. I think he was being influenced by an old timer that hadn't caught on to the full digital experience yet.

what your saying about groove clips and time stretching is true, it can leave artifacts, if the recordings start to sound slower, then its the adat, every time i use an adat i tend to fast forward a few minutes so i dont get that drag (10 mins ffw), sounds like your stuck with wat you've got Beepster, but by all means try groove clipping or time stretching

If you still had the adat then you'd have something to play with, do you not have the tape anywhere ???

@scook. Hey, buddy. Yup. It all makes sense now. Whew... so glad this worked out. Now I might actually be able to get some work done. Thanks all. I might be around a little more again now that I'm back in front of the DAW. Been spending the last couple months giving myself a crash course in jazz theory and dissecting harmonic/melodic minor and all their modes. Cheers.

The default sample rate of an ADAT is 48K and many engineers just used it there myself included. Even from the early ADAT's you could adjust the sample rate actually down to 44.1 but it required a bit of fiddling to do it. I also didn't like doing it because the machine whined at that sample rate for some reason and I could hear it much more so and it annoyed me.

The obvious thing to do is just work on your mix and mastering right up to the last minute at 48K and sample rate convert then. What I did was convert the tracks over to 44.1K sample rate wise before even importing them into a DAW. A program such as Adobe Audition does this easily. Then you can apply effects etc and you are working from the right sample rate from the start.

Probably a very similar result. It is better too if you can transfer from ADAT to files digitally. I have got the Alesis card and software that does this very well. The black faced ADAT actually had pretty decent converters in them and they sounded very OK. I get the odd jobs transferring ADAT's over for people. There are still a lot of multitrack sessions around done in that format. (I am glad we are over them though!) The later models that had the higher bit depths were OK too. 

@Chregg... Heh. Thanks, man. Tryin' my best here. Slow but sure. ;-)

@Jeff... Hello my friend. This is great info to have in case I encounter old ADAT recordings again. The whole DAW to tape to DAW thing has always bent my brain a bit but the mystery is fading a bit now after this experience and the helpful advice here. Thanks. I hope you've been well.

So here's an update on what's happening. I've been having a heck of a time getting these tracks over to the new system and into Sonar but I think I've got it now. First problem was the old system would get to 99% completion while trying to export an OMF and then it would choke. It created a file though so I tried opening it in X2. No dice. It was corrupt. So then I tried AES31 format which I had never heard of before but in the Nuendo manual it says it's supposed to just export waves that can be used in other DAWS with an option to hang on to fades and volume automation. Well it only created a tiny little file but no audio sooo... no dice. Then I thought I'd try to see if I could do a multitrack export like can be done with Sonar. Only let's you export one track at a time which would take forever and I'm not sure how hard it'd be to sync them all back up. I was thinking that could be a last resort. There was one other option which was "Selected Tracks". This seems to just copy all the waves in the project and put them in a folder. They do sync up so I tried this. Because the project was an hour worth of material broken up into songs I ended up with a huge pile of tracks. One track for each instrument AND for each song. Yikes. I also neglected to change my samplerate in the Sonar project so they overlapped. Big old mess. The final answer seems to be going through the individual waves and selecting the instrument tracks for each one using CTRL select and importing them that way. One other problem I had was I checked off the box that says "import tracks as mono" and was only getting one side. They should be mono tracks but they don't want to playback through the master in stereo. Whatever... I just unchecked that box and now everything is stereo and it seems to be working fine. However listening back I realize some of the actual recording and playing is quite poor but I think the drums and vocals are salvageable which was the most important part for me anyway. The rest I can overdub.

So tl;dr... I've finally managed to figure out how to get this stuff into Sonar so I can work on it. Hooray! Being able to get this project into Sonar has been a major concern of mine for a while now but it looks like I can make it happen.

Cheers, guys and thanks again. Stay awesome.