Working with ADAT Tape

I have started another project this week in collaboration with Capital Music Tech. I am digitizing old ADAT tape recordings. I started this past weekend and have almost gotten the method for getting these tapes into ProTools down.

One of the main problems with ADAT tapes is the only things that can play them are old ADAT tape players from the 90s. These are not the most reliable machines and have a whole host of problems getting connected to modern hardware. On Capital campus, we only have one of these tape players, an Alesis xt20 type II. The songs that I am digitizing are 24 tracks split across 3 tapes, 8 tracks to each tape. This means that I need to record each songs 8 tracks from each tape and then line them up in ProTools. This becomes especially difficult when taking into consideration tape drift.

This past weekend, I did manage to get analog output feeding into ProTools to record one song. However, I want to try to do it through digital means rather than analog, which will take more troubleshooting. Hopefully I will figure that out the next time I work on this.