that's a good possibilty

hmm... well it is set to 44.1 but maybe it was recorded at something else. I didn't realize that the samplerate could affect the speed. I'll check it out. I'm currently attempting to export it as an OMF and it froze the old system first try so exporting looks like it might be a problem too. Gonna try doing a straight track by track export if it fails again or doesn't import to Sonar properly.

Also, hiya, John. How you been?

@Chregg... No, no tape or ADAT machine. I asked for all that stuff but I guess the dude reused the tapes or something. It's all a big mess actually so I'm just trying to salvage what I can. I've got another version of all these tunes but they were recorded in an inferior room, the tempos fluctuate wildly and it was just bed tracks so it doesn't have the original artists this one does. This is all going to be a major pain however I do it but if I could just get this set of takes up to the original speed it'll be a lot easier. If anyone has any more suggestions I'm all ears.

Thanks again, guys.

I believe ADAT started out at 48k only.

You are freaking life saver, John. It was the samplerate. It was set to 44.1 so I switched to 88.1 and got chimpmunk action so I tried 48 and voila. I can't believe I had never come across the speed/sample rate thing in all my studies. I thought it just screwed with the quality.

@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.

go the Beepster ;)

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. 

Beepster


You are freaking life saver, John. It was the samplerate. It was set to 44.1 so I switched to 88.1 and got chimpmunk action so I tried 48 and voila. I can't believe I had never come across the speed/sample rate thing in all my studies. I thought it just screwed with the quality.

It makes me happy seeing you solve a problem. If I had a little bit to do with it so much the better. 

I thought it might be 48 but I figured if you went through the rates one would work.  I record everything at 44.1. That way I don't have to worry about matching anything it is always just 44.1. 

@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.

Oh you totally nailed that one John. As soon as I got the chimpmunk effect at 88.1 I knew 48 would work... and it did. Good call. ;-)