A different way to think about mixing Octatrack material

After a hiatus, I have been lured back to the OT. And, and always, one thing that always bugs me is what to do about mixing OT material.

There are many approaches, each with their own pros and cons.

  • Some folks just work in OT only. This is fine, but I desire the additional processing and mixing capabilities one can get from mixing in a DAW.
  • Some folks export their stems to a DAW, which is not easy.
  • Some folks only bring pre-mixed material into OT.
  • And so on.

I thought of another way, and I am wondering if others have explored this, and what, if any, thoughts they might have.

In short, it involves copying your OT samples to a computer/DAW. Processing them, exporting them, and then re-importing them back to OT, with the exact same file names so that OT does not know there is any difference.

For example, say I work up a sick jam in the OT, and it is getting close to being done. I could export all that project’s samples as described above, EQ, compress, sparkle, etc. them in my DAW, and then bring them back to OT.

This might require some thinking around sample naming and organization, and it could get tricky with tons of samples. [Edit: Not really, as pointed out in subsequent posts below.] But, in a lot of cases, especially when sliced and manged samples are resampled to new stems in the OT, it seems like it could work.

Anyhow, whach’all think?

3 Likes

…this could come in handy in the above situation and for more :smiley_cat:

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I’d just replace the samples in place with new samples… a smart cat would pre assign the slices as well; so you could just drop them in even easier; thus and retaining all the assignments; locks, slices etc.

Easy peasy, lemon squeezy as they say.

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Brilliant. This is why I asked the question here, to get feedback like this.

I was thinking it would be way more complicated with slices and stuff, but it is not at all. If you simply replace the samples on the OT, the slices still point to the same sample.