I pulled out my dusty, abandoned Roland hard disk recorder from the 90's to see if it still worked, but also to see if I could transfer its forgotten songs to my DAW. Here's how I did it.
Bought a mint vs1880 a few weeks ago to get the old vibe back into my studio. Replaced the hard drive with a brand new IDE SSD (Amazon) and it works great. Like someone else said, using the digital outputs and midi sync keeps everything lined up when exporting to DAW.
I still have my fully-functional original first generation VS840. I bought it the first day that the Roland rep carried a stack of them into Guitar Center here in Dallas. A tip that helped me move all of my old song/track data onto a new platform (the VS840 file format was proprietary - not common .wav files) - was to record a short blip (I used a drum machine hit of some sort) on all tracks at the very beginning of each song. Then I would play/record each track into a separate platform in real time. Then simply use the waveform function to line everything up. Worked *perfectly*.
I liked the song really a lot, I find it to be a hit if is produced right with a much better sound, specially the drums which I found them to be very harsh in the recording but good groove, it has a Beatles feel to it too, congratulations and greetings from Germany, Alfredo
i don't recall mine having any "external drives", aka Zip or CD...anyway, it was great fun, and i think the reverb was excellent. i still have my recordings also...they were "exported" first to cassette though, then later digitized to CD. fun times. i suppose mine was an earlier version. i do know that one or two of the faders was giving me intermittent trouble in the end.
Thanks Ian. A few songs from that project are not accessible anymore due to zip disc drive failure, but most of them will transfer successfully. It's fun hearing this stuff after 17+ years!
two words...midi sync. that will help with timing, when recording multiple tracks individually. as in, you press play on the mixer and your computer starts to record at the same time without you even having to touch a mouse or keyboard. thats how the pro's do it. if anyone ask's ? you never even heard of a militaryminded85...now go.
I am about to buy an multi track recorder (choosing between a 32 track all the way down to the old school VS-840 (EX). SO i have a couple of questions and i hope to get some answer to help me out. How do you transfer 'information' from the recorder to a pc? What program or software do you use? I want to be 'old school' and not looking at a screen during recordings, only for vst synths. And is it possible to use 100mb zip disks ona 250 zip drive? Thanks in advance. and thanks for sharing.
250MB drive play both 100 and 250 disks. Not always the easiest to find but if you have or can get a USB zip drive, there is a program for a very similar recorder called the Boss BR8. Look it up, the converter is free. This allows you to pull the tracks to WAV files, including virtual tracks. Just pick the track you want (or two to make a stereo file) and it will convert it. you can convert the other direction too and put tracks on the disk. It has a drive built into the VS-840 so you have to move the disk from that to the computer USB zip drive.
@@FB-gm6el he just want's to be looking cool. I'd understand when people are after a hardware sequencer as many of them are way more comprehensive than any other ones built in DAWs. But mixing on a H/W recorder with no computer is a sort of true masochism that was conformed by famous producers who grew up on the hardware recorders and analog consoles.
I thought the song was very musical. Clever beach boys pastiche which isn't easy to do. obviously you were larking about to a degree but that still sounds better than some of the bands you see on festivals. I also thought it sounded OK just on the roland. No need for a daw
i did this last week with a 4 track cassette recorder i was like i wonder if i can record 0ne track at a time in the daw and putt it in time yes you can not hard i even use the most basic daw as part of the test audacity hahah
I have this item and was wondering if you have any tips on fixing a non-working play button...never had issue with this recorder before..now everything works except the play button... 😒
Thanks for your question. I'm not a fix-it guy, so I don't have any advice about that. It probably involved opening up the machine, which I wouldn't have the technical knowledge to do. Hope you can find an answer to that somehow.
Indeed! After not using it for years and years, I had to pull out the manual to figure out the most basic of things. I learned just enough to transfer my tracks over to Cubase.
That's true. I'll be able to beef up what was originally recorded, but some things will still sound kind of crappy, just because the source material was recorded into that old machine. There's no plugin to fix bad recording techniques!! New technology makes even novice recording engineers sound like pros.
Here's the very 1st recording I did with my VS-840GX back in 2000 ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-h88Jqe7eHL4.html Nice machine. Not very user friendly though. If I didnt have the books, I wouldve been totally lost. Also, the zip drive sucks. Too slow. Ran into alot of errors. I like the internal modeling and effects though. Anyway, I liked the Korg digital 8 track more. But sadly the one I bought off ebay had a bad hard drive and I had to send it back. That's when I got the Roland.
I didn't. The zip drive is in the hard disk recorder, so I loaded that machine up just like I used to in the old days, but then I sent the audio from the Roland to my Cubase system.
c'mon you dont have a arranger track set up in cubase i dont see automation either it's nowhere near masterd. but i am not happy i always wanted a roland vs but it dont have xlr's so i dont want one now
