Hi,
I just worked on a DAT to WAV transfer.
The scenario: In the 1990s someone had transferred our 78s to DAT and
now someone else has transferred the DATs to wave. Originally, there
was 1 ID per disk which is usually 2 tracks per disk. (But you wonder
how many 78s have only one side.) The last guy didn't preserve the IDs
from the disks (as I told him to) which resulted in 10 days of work
for me for just over 4000 sides/tracks.
Anyway, in this case it worked quite nicely to autosplit at silience
to get the tracks. I did this with wavelab, but I heard that all the
programs can do it now. Luckily 78s have only one or two sides so I
look up the info in the database and thus could reconstruct the
original ids. To write a script that does this took me 4 days. The
rest of the time was checking all that cases that our database info
wasn't right so that the number of files and the number of tracks in
the db didn't match.
Lesson: sometimes it is better to preserve the IDs.
By the way: we had not a single DAT which we couldn't play back so
far. I have seen on this list that some of you had very problematic
DATs from the 1990s.
best
Maurice
PS: We experimented with extracting IDs automatically, but were not
able to do this reliably for every tape. Anyone interested in the
details?
----------------------------------------------
Maurice Mengel
Music Archive
Ethnological Museum
National Museums in Berlin
http://www.ilkar.de
---------------------------------------------
On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 8:33 PM, Lou Judson<[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Here's a slightly different point of view: I transfer quite a few DATs of my
> own and for clients, and I have found that with a waveform editor DAT IDs
> are nearly irrelevant - if you open the file you can see the start places
> immediately!
>
> Thus I at least don;t worry about DAY IDs unless the client specifies which
> IDs to transfer - even then, I'l transfer the entire thing on the off chance
> it is the last time that DAT might play...
>
> Just curious if this sort of logic occurs to you, and if not why you need
> the IDs in Protools? For audio CDs I can see why you'd want them, and some
> CD recorders willpick them up...
>
> I recall vaguely from the 90s that some DAT players do send the subcodes via
> SPDIF and some don't - I had Sonys and the studio where we worked had
> Panasonics - Dave, do you remember which was which?
>
> Lou
> Lou Judson • Intuitive Audio
> 415-883-2689
>
>
> On Aug 11, 2009, at 6:15 PM, Craig Johnson wrote:
>
> Kudos in advance to he/she who can suggest the best way to digitally
> transfer audio DAT tapes to .wav file(s) on hard drive with the DATs' Start
> IDs carried over as cue points or region breaks or start-a-new-wav-file or
> whatnot. I'm using Pro Tools and would prefer to stay in that environment
> but I'm also open to other systems as a last resort. I have enough DATs to
> transfer, most with multiple tracks on them, that manually inserting cue
> points or region breaks, or starting and stopping, is both too labor
> intensive and too inaccurate.
>
> Getting the audio data into a computer file is the easy part. The problem
> is bringing the Start ID locations across. I know that the S/PDIF interface
> carries Start ID data from DAT machines, so I'm fine on that end. Now it's
> a matter of finding some sort of thingy to automatically translate that to
> the resulting computer file(s). Again, preferably in Pro Tools but I'm open
> to other suggestions.
>
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