This article is dedicated to the Invincible Robojo-talbotron. I hope you enjoy getting to listen to your old tunes again. This is not only a tutorial but a love letter to a time long past. My friends and I made so many good songs with the little BR-8. It was amazing! I thought it fitting to make the first blog on this site about the BR-8.
I recall the first time I had to take it apart to do a repair. Tensions were high, it was working but the play button was very intermittent. I think I took an old switch out of a VCR to fix it. Over time my friend Joe used over 40 discs! Those things were expensive. At the time we were in our late teens and didn’t have much money. We had no way to offload the discs or any way to back them up.
The year was 2008, I was doing a PC repair for a co-worker when I found it. An IDE/ATA Zip drive! I offered to trade the work for the drive. My co-worker agreed. Now I had to see if it was possible to back up the discs. I called Joe immediately and told him the news.
Some time later my friend came over and we started backing them up. One by one. It was very tedious. I had found the BR-8 .wav converter software and was stumbling my way through it.
At the time I thought I had to use the Zip disc to extract the files and convert into .wav files. I. WAS.WRONG. I feel like a dummy for not noticing this.
We converted a few over and left the rest. We knew they were safe. Afterwards I formatted a few for Joe. The Zip discs were becoming scarce in stores.
The Bad News
I didn’t think about them for years. Until I found out the Joe’s BR-8, all the discs, and a bunch of his other belongings were stolen. Talk about priceless, there were songs that were irreplaceable. Hours of work gone.
Fast Foward
Fast forward to 2020. Joe and I have been saying for years that we would get together and transfer his songs back to him. A few months ago I got my hands on a USB Zip drive and was going to send it to him. Then I realized, we didn’t need the drive at all.
I talked to Joe on the phone last week and thought about that again. I dropped what I was doing and burnt his stuff and a bunch of our music to discs. Last Saturday I had a few minutes and decided to drop off the discs. He was at work and I visited with his Dad. Amazing how time flies. Over 12 years had passed since we made the copies. At least the music wasn’t lost.
Brief History of the Boss BR-8
The BR-8 multitrack recorder was released in 1999 by the Boss company. This was compact digital recorder that used the Iomega Zip Disc as the recording media. At the time of it’s release it was a good quality portable recording unit. The only real limitation was the size of the ZIP disc. With a full blown 8 track song, your song could realistically only be about 5 to 6 minutes. I can recall getting down to the wire with space.
Here are some of the features from the Boss Website:
How to convert the BR-8 files into .wav files
Now it’s time for the meat and potatoes of this blog article.
Step 1: Download the conversion software
Go to this site and download the BR-8 wav convert software.
https://www.boss.info/us/support/by_product/br-8/
Since this is a .exe file, installation is not necessary. Navigate to your downloads and double click this .exe file.
Step 2: Prepare the data
Things get a little weird here but stay with me. The software wants to see the data in the root of a folder. Unfortunately, you cannot navigate through subfolders. If you are using a zip drive, you can go straight to the drive. If not, follow the instruction below.
Open up your disc and highlight the data, right-click and select copy.
Paste this data to the root of a USB stick or an SD card. The definition of the root is the top folder of the drive. When you go to “This PC” and open that window, double-clicking, for example, the SD card would be the root or top folder. In my case, I’m using a USB stick and it is designated as the E:\ drive.
Step 3: Convert the data into .wav format
Open the conversion software, and where it says BR-8 media drive choose your drive. Again, in my case it is the E:\ drive.
Your screen should look similar to the one below.
Notice the dropdown box labeled song. If you had multiple songs on the disc, this is how you’d change songs.
Chose the track you’d like to convert and click it. You can choose 2 tracks simultaneously. In my opinion, however, it may be best to convert them independently unless you know it was recorded in stereo. It’s easy enough to fix that in recording software like Cakewalk or Protools.
Now select BR-8 Track to Wave file in the lower left. Navigate to the folder you want to store the output file in.
Repeat this process until you get what you want.
Conclusion
That’s it! It’s that easy. Now import into your favorite DAW and pick up where you left off. Thanks for reading. Leave a comment below and sign up for more updates.
