I need your help. I recovered old cassettes that I had recorded in 1985 (i was very young) with a 4 track recorder (I don't remember if fostex or teac). It contains several interesting songs that I would like to restore and burn.
Unfortunately I no longer have the 4-track recorder, so I tried to recover the songs in the most banal way: I imported the first 2 tracks (originally track 1 and 2) into cubase with a classic cassette player and then, playing side B of the cassette, i imported the remaining 2 tracks (originally track 3 and 4).
I then inverted these last imported tracks, repositioning them in sync with the start point of tracks 1 and 2.
The problem comes now: in practice I have found that the sync between the 4 tracks remains only for a few minutes. Already after 3 minutes tracks 3 and 4 (the inverted ones) begin to lose sync progressively and more and more importantly.
I therefore understood that even the best tape (TDK metal) and a good recorder do not maintain a constant recording speed, probably due to the variable drag resistance of the tape ... Therefore when I recorded the 4 tracks in parallel the speed and the sync between tracks was obviously constant, but when I export tracks 3-4 backwards this happens with progressively different speeds from how they were recorded.
Your best bet would be to find a good 4-track recorder, but it's rare to find them and the costs are insane.
Maybe someone has an idea to suggest?
Thanks!

 

Melodyne - Capstan (Check your mailbox)

Capstan - Putting an end to synchronization fluctuations

Music has been recorded on mechanical media for over 100 years. And for more than 100 years there has been a problem with it: the synchronous oscillation. Who doesn't know the egging and the lyring, the wobbling and the pulling? Mechanical problems, caused by defective machines or stuck tapes, by aging or wrong storage. Until now, synchronicity was usually beyond repair.

Countless recordings of famous orchestras, big bands and rock groups slumber deep in the archives. But they are simply unusable because of these very synchronization fluctuations. The tape is worthless, the recording lost to posterity. Until now.

Capstan is the first program to remove synchronization fluctuations from music recordings. Whether from tape or compact cassette, wax, shellac or vinyl.

www.celemony.com/en/capstan
www.soundonsound.com/reviews/celemony-capstan

 

You could use Ableton Live's warp markers and "repitch" mode to sychronize both stereo tracks. The repitch mode does no "harm" to the audio as it's just changing the playback speed with no stretching algorithm.

Capstan is no solution here as it's for correcting wow and flutter and has no option to synchronize tracks.

 

Yeah, I think if it were me I'd just stretch tracks and use trial and error until they line up. May be time consuming, but doable. Actually Myfanwy is right... if the time drifted the pitch must have as well... get the pitch right and the time should go with it. Then line them up. If each set of tracks stretched independently of each other do you still have a job ahead of you though!

 

Your issue is the nature of an analog medium, which is why I love cassette tapes. The playback will never be the same each time. Which is a great trick for making super wide ambient tape loop tracks

 

Good and mostly expensive tapeplayers as used in pro studios are playing with constant speed! A professional studio digitalizing analog material doesn't cost much. If the recordings are important i would think about! Then you would have best possible source material to work over with capstan and izotope RX...

 

Last edited: Feb 27, 2022

I don't think there can be any practical solution besides using a 4 track tape recorder. You have a couple of options: search for someone that has that machine and hire the studio to transcode your cassettes into digital tracks. The other option is to buy a used recorder on Ebay and to do it yourself

You say "... it's rare to find them and the costs are insane"

Rare Not at all: just search in Ebay (I just did it), there are dozen available.

Prices: well, it depends on what you mean by “insane”. Working condition starting at $ 250. I believe that bringing back to life a memory from 37 years ago is worth that amount

 

Last edited by a moderator: Feb 27, 2022

You can always resell when you're through too. Just buying one will probably keep years on your life vs. doing it the other way!

 

Audacity, and just about any DAW can reverse a track of audio.

Record stereo forward
The 2 other tracks will play in reverse, when you reverse the tape

Flip the backwards track and sync the 4-tracks back together.
--
You are in business
A 4-track head is a regular head used on auto reverse decks, just only 2-tracks at a time are played.

Oh, and the pitch may be down an octave. Easy to raise.
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Ideally, you'll want to drop all four tracks at once. Unlike ADAT and DAT decks, cassette playback isn't locked to machine time. The cassette deck's capstans won't rotate at perfectly consistent speed, and the tape itself will likely have some stretched areas that throw off time and pitch in those sections. All that is to say, if you drop only two tracks at a time into a DAW, lining all four tracks up and keeping them locked may not be trivial.
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Ableton Live is good at this. You can grab sections of an audio track and line them up.

Of course you can also rent capstan for a week to clean up all the wow and flutter:
Celemony | Capstan

Source:www.talkbass.com/threads/rescuing-old-4-track-cassette-recordings-in-the-digital-age.1218485/

 

That's literally everything that's already been discussed

 

Since your deck doesn't have an erase; use a standard cassette deck to erase side 'a' and flip it over and do side 'b'. That will erase all 4 tracks.

 

When using 4-track cassette recorders in the 80s, most of the time each track was recorded in a different take, so phase coherence between tracks is not important, although tracks 1+2 and 3+4 are already phase coherent if transferred with a simple 2 track cassette recorder. The timing can be corrected by using any DAW capable of using stretch markers and simple "re-pitch" algorithms.

More important may be the noise reduction system used while recording (dbx or Dolby B/C) to get the most natural sound of the recording.