In my quest for digital control of our analogue mastering facility, I have been looking at the reel to reel machines. I would like to be able to fully control the 1/4″ machine (Otari MTR-12) from the computer. I could make a simple remote for it, but how boring would that be? An auto-locator would be much better, but they are rare nowadays, and wouldn’t do exactly what I have in my head anyway. So, the big question is:
Could one make an Arduino microcontroller act as a midi-controlled auto-locator for an Otari MTR-12?
After some careful analysis of the schematic for the old auto-locator offered by Otari, I can’t see any reason why one couldn’t.
The brains for this functionality are actually in the tape machine, and the auto-locator is really just some switches and digital display elements. The timing for the digital circuit may be the only challenging aspect of the project, as I would like the tape and locate times to be reported properly and instantly, of course.
So, I will dive into it and report my progress. Should be fun and interesting. Feel free to make fun of me.
You actually make it seem really easy with your presentation but I find
this matter to be actually something which I feel I might by
no means understand. It kind of feels too complicated and extremely large for me.
I am looking forward to your next post, I will try to
get the dangle of it!
Cool project. Is it still running?
I imagine you may know this by now. 🙂
That connector looks like a standard 50 pin Dsub connector with pins 18 and 33 blocked. You just pull or leave out those pins in the male connector and it will fit. This was common back when you wanted to make sure some incompatible device couldn’t be plugged in by mistake.
Thanks for a cool project.
Thanks for your kind words. The project is still running, although we have changed it to run on Ethernet instead of midi. The midi worked fine but we moved all of our other studio control over to Ethernet, so it had to follow. The connector tunred out to be a Honda MR-50F. We were able to find a mate for it on EBay.