Interfacing the VS Workstation with a Computer

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There are a number of ways to transfer your tracks between the VS and a computer. The exact setup and configuration details depend on the specific hardware and software you are using on the computer. I'll provide an overview of the process from the VS side, and you'll need to fill in the details related to the computer side.

Analog and Digital Transfers

If you want to transfer the signal on the Mix bus to the computer, simply make the appropriate analog or digital connection between the VS and computer, press record on your audio software recorder, and press PLAY on the VS. This is a common technique for mixing down tracks and sending the resulting stereo pair to a software audio editor on the computer. On the other hand, if you want to transfer tracks from the VS so that you can mix the tracks on the computer, you'll have to transfer all of the individual tracks. To do this, you can sync the VS and the computer and then play a subset of tracks on the VS while recording them on the computer. If you set up your sync parameters correctly, each track you transfer from the VS to the computer should line up in the timeline.

If you can't sync the VS and computer, you can record a short reference point at the beginning of all your tracks on the VS. For example, you could put a handclap or single snare hit at the beginning of all your tracks. After you transfer all your tracks to the computer, use your software audio editor to visually align all the tracks via the reference point in the beginning of each track.

If you want to transfer audio from the computer to the VS via the digital connections, make sure your soundcard or external transfer device can output using a 44.1kHz sample rate. Many of the consumer models of these devices can only output from the computer at a 48kHz sample rate.

SCSI Transfers

If your computer has a SCSI port, you may think that you could simply connect the VS to the computer via SCSI. This is not recommended, and doing so can possibly damage your computer or your VS. The VS never transfers audio via the SCSI port, only data.

However, there is one interesting way to use SCSI devices with both the VS and a computer. You can connect external SCSI hard drives and external SCSI ZIP drives to the VS and then copy data to and from the internal hard drive on the VS to the external drives . Once you've got data on the external drive, disconnect the SCSI device from the VS and connect it to the computer. Each VS partition on the external SCSI device will be listed as a separate drive on the computer, and you can copy files from the SCSI drive to the computer hard drive. Doing this is an alternative to performing the backup function on the VS. Once the data is on your computer, you can burn it to a CD, but you will not be able to recover the data on that CD directly to the VS via the recover function.

If you originally recorded the song on the VS using MAS mode, it can be read as audio data by a number of software audio editors once you get the data onto the computer. While this seems like good way to get audio data to the computer, there is a catch. Every time you record a new piece of audio on the VS, that audio gets stored in its own file on the hard drive. So every time you record, punch in, overdub , and so on that audio gets stored in a different file. The internal names for these data files are random. Therefore, when you look at these files on the computer, you'll have no way to know which file represents which track or which file represents which punch-in or overdub. The workaround for all of this would be to bounce each of your tracks to a new track so that all the individual audio parts are present as a single audio part in the new track. Then, erase all the original tracks, leaving just the new bounced-down versions. Finally, use Song Optimize to really delete all the old tracks. The only tracks remaining will be the newly bounced-down tracks, and these will all be complete audio tracks.

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Roland VS Recorder Power.
Roland VS Recorder Power.
ISBN: 1592008364
EAN: N/A
Year: 2005
Pages: 202

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