That makes it a horse of a different color. Is the imine of alpha-methylbenzylamine or benzylamine and butyraldehyde a known compound? I would check to see how they were made.
I don't have experience with imines of the type you are trying to prepare. I know that if one wishes to prepare an enamine of an aldehyde, what forms is the aminal with potassium carbonate. This is cracked to get the enamine. Although it seemed better that you had a dioxolane, but I don't necessarily think it survived the imine forming reaction. This looked different than what I thought the spectrum should look like, but I really don't know. I don't know what the starting materials looked like. It could be okay, but aldehydes are pretty easily enolized, etc. I could imagine competing reactions occurring here.
I cannot advise you on this particular reaction, but you should be able to find reaction conditions for more simple analogs to find optimal conditions. Given the difficulties you are incurring, the complexity of the reaction you wish to try, I would hone my technique by synthesizing a simpler intermediate first. We've all faced your question, "Is it me, or is it the reaction?" We can't answer that. You need to establish that yourself. Your conditions were plausible enough. Do they work with enolizable aldehydes? with beta-alkoxy aldehydes?