HI, I have recently imported 8 tracks into Cubase 10 from a reel to reel tape recorder.
7 of the tracks contain musical WAV audio files, the 8th track is a WAV file which was “striped” with and generates the noise of the SMPTE code. Is there anyway I can get Cubase to read or understand the code noise being generated from track 8 and pick up the tempo instructions?
Thank you!
SMPTE timecode does not contain tempo instructions.
Thank you. Is this track useable in anyway to establish the tempo of the other tracks in the song?
No.
SMPTE only contains time information. It doesn’t contain any musical information such as tempo or beats.
Thank you, that helps. I suppose I was wondering if it is possible for Cubase to read that time information?
I’m guessing not 
Not directly but by using a SMTPE to MTC converter.
If you are on a Mac you can use Lockstep (a little free app) to sync cubase to the SMPTE track. Your recorded SMPTE must be routed to an input channel of your audio interface, use this as the input in Lockstep. And Cubase must be externally synced to the virtual Lockstep MTC output. Should work.
Question is just: what for…?
Yes. I misread the first post. It makes only sense if you want to sync Cubase to a tape machine which has a SMPTE track. If the SMPTE track is already recorded in Cubase it is pretty useless.
SMPTE is used to lock the tape machine to another machine. In my case in the early days of midi when Cubase first started out, it was used to lock the tape recorder to my Atari Computer, so that I could run various synth sound modules and thus increase the track count. The SMPTE contained no info other than a time code to lock the midi to the tape. Certainly at the time computer first started to be used for music many musicians still wanted to use the Atari for MIDI recording purposes as the Atari’s timing was much better that early PCs’ and Apple’s.
Exactly my experience too. Foster A8, 1 track striped with SMPTE enabled me to lock in with Atari ST. We used to go to a lot of bother 
Thanks for all replies, I’ve given up on using SMPTE but had good success using tempo detection on the other tracks.