Making Midi Files for Importing to Tascam 2488

Tascam 2488:
I use Vista and my 2488 MK1.

When you plug in the USB cable from the 2488 into your Vista PC, Vista will always say 'not recognised'.
You do not need any PC drivers for the 2488. On the Tascam 2488, go to 'Menu', then 'Disk', then 'USB Open/Close', then click 'Yes'.
On your PC the 2488 will appear as a new hard drive in the 'Computer' folder, called HDR2488.
You'll see three folders in there: WAVE, SMF and BACKUP.
Use the WAVE folder to import and export WAV files, the SMF folder to import midi files to the 2488, and the BACKUP folder is where you can import and export Backup files to and from the 2488.
Hope this helps!

Real musicians do change tempo throughout a song, so its not necessarily a bad thing. As long as you like the sound it doesn't matter if you don't stick rigidly to a fixed tempo. Unfortunately you won't be able to fix the tempo after the initial recording so you'll have to live with it or re-record. If you need a click track to record along to, try recording yourself hitting drum stick together along to the already recorded track. As a human you can track small tempo changes much easier than a computer. If you need to create a count in, just copy and paste a section of this click track to the start of the track. I hope this makes sense!

You'll need your PC as the intermediary. You'll have to do a USB export of the tracks you want from the DP01 to your PC and then connect the 2488's USB to the PC and do a USB import of those tracks into new tracks on the 2488.

Page 40 of the DP01FX manual will explain using the USB connection and page 43 details the steps for performing a USB export.

In the 2488 NEO manual refer to pages 80 and 81 for using the USB connection and importing the tracks.

Hope this helps. Best of luck.
bd.

The best way to accomplish this would involve ripping the sountrack from disk first using your PC to create a wav file and then importing the resulting stereo wav file into a pair of tracks on the 2488 NEO.

The process for ripping would depend on whatever software you use to rip from the CD (lots of free ones available out there) and the process to import a stereo wave into the 2488 NEO would be detailed in your 2488 manual on pages 81 and 81.

Hope this helps.

bd.

No. Unfortunately you are stuck with the drum kits and standard midi that come with the 2488. I find the tone generator sounds to be pretty good on the 2488 quality-wise at least. Of course having the versatility of swapping in other kits and tones/samples would be nice. I believe Tascam discontinued the tone generator/drum machine on subsequent models of 2488 because it seems that the demand wasn't there.

Make sure you have the song loaded first. In this case it sounds like you are importing into a new song, so make sure that you have a new song created and loaded prior to importing.

Then go to the menu by pressing the 'MENU' sutton and from there select 'WAVE' and then 'IMPORT TRACK'. You'll see the list of wav files on the fat partition of the CF media displayed. Select the wav file with your beat track on it (use the DATA DIAL or up/down arrow buttons to highlight the right wav file) and press the 'YES/ENTER' button. You'll be prompted for the track to import into. Select Track01 and press the 'Yes/Enter' button again and the WAV file will be read and inported into track 1.

Please note that the wav file should be a 44.1 kHz, 16-bit and a mono wav before trying to import it. If the beat track was created as a stereo wav you'll have to go into a wav editor like Audacity and resave the file as a mono wav file first. Also for a wav with a bit rate higher than 16-bit, the DP-02 is going to truncate the bits rather than dither and this might effect quality adversly so you might want to make sure that the file is properly saved as 16-bit prior to attempting an import to avoid this.

Hope this helps.

bd.

There shouldn't be any compatibility problems, especially since you can transfer files one way already. You might want to make sure any wav files you are trying to import to tracks on the 2488 are saved as 'mono' waves rather than 'stereo'. The 2488 won't import a stereo wav file.

Another problem sould be naming. Try to stick to the old dos 8.3 naming standard (xxxxxxxx.xxx) for any files which you wish to import.

Hope this helps.

bd.

Sounds to me like you have the midi tracks outputting to the microsoft midi mapper or wavetable synth, which is built into the sound chip in your pc, and that this is conflicting with the mobilepre sound card - midi is just data, no audio, needs to drive some kind of synth. what you want to do is disable your internal sound card thru device manager, then just use the m-audio mobile pre as the input/output sound card in ASIO mode - you'll need to monitor via the headphone jack on the mobile pre or plug speakers into the line outs on the interface.

Then do tutorial 8 (in help files) on using soft synths - INSERT>SOFTSYNTHs creates a midi track and an audio track in a track folder.

Good luck.

The dude.

There is no way to 'sync' with protools from the 2488. In order to use your 2488 tracks in protools you have to first export your tracks as wav files and move them to your computer via usb and then import them into protools.

To get Protools files into your Tascam 2488 you'll have to export your Protools files into mono wav files first. They must also have a sampling rate of 44.1KHz and can be either 16 or 24 bit. Then load these files into your 2488 via usb and import them into tracks on the 2488.

Link to Tascam 2488 documents page:
http://tascam.com/Products/2488_downloads.html

Individual Items as Listed:

Link to the Tascam 2488 product brochure:
http://tascam.com/Products/2488/2488_bro.pdf

Link to the Tascam 2488 application guide:
http://tascam.com/Products/2488/2488_AppGuide.pdf

Here's the link to the Tascam 2488 quick start guide:
http://tascam.com/Products/2488/2488_quickstart.pdf

Link to the updated Tascam 2488 manual:
http://www.tascamcontractor.com/ftp_resour...w_additions.pdf

Link to the Tascam 2488 manual additions:
http://www.tascamcontractor.com/ftp_resour...e_additions.pdf

Link to the Tascam 2488 MIDI Parameter Mapping
http://www.tascamcontractor.com/ftp_resour...ontrol_v0.2.pdf

Link to TASCAM 2488 Hi-Res images:
http://www.tascamcontractor.com/ftp_resour...488_images.html