Tascam Fiddling

[Davepriest]

Hi,
Just bought a 788 on ebay because it's the only budget costing multi track that can do more than 2 tracks at once and planning to record my band and see what it's capable of.
Also I'm aware the main limitation of the 788 is the ability to export the digital data to a pc easily.
Personally I'm up for a bit of challenge and I like to hack kit. Looking at previous posts has anyone tried using an ide2sd interface and using an sd card as the main hdd? And does it work? If you plug the internal hdd into a pc does it reconise the format of the drive? Can you get files off it?
The main way I was planning to import is using the digital out then getting a sound card with digital in, still struggling to find a cheap option, most only support toslink, any ideas?

Thanks

Dave

 

[RealTime]

Hi,
I haven't tried ide2SD but the 788 drive format is definitely not PC compatible. The 788 audio files are TASCAM bespoke format, i.e. they are not .wav or .mp3 etc, so you can't directly view them or play them on a PC.

One big advantage the SD route would have is 'no noise'. My 788 hdd is very noisy during record and playback.

Ian

 

[Davepriest]

Hi,

Was hoping the format of the drive would be readable somehow surely must be based on a normal format. Pretty sure I can write some kind of translation program to convert the files if I can read them. May try the sd route and see what I can do.

 

[blckjck]

I have not tried to view the drive itself. I find it easier to export via the digital out into my PC or to WAV on CD.
I would think the data itself is in some sort of PCM format. I don't know if it would be worth the effort. A digital insterface is cheap, direct, and already supported.