For some reason, I am getting 2 copies of my replies to the list. Thankfully, they seem to have fixed the "getting kicked off the list" problem, but the last post I made came back twice, one with the formatting and links intact, and one that condensed the type (eliminating spaces and breaking some links). At any rate, I'd like to add a couple of things to the DAT discussion. 1. ABS time. Some tapes were recorded without ABS time. Sony's original D10 portable was made before ABS was implemented. I know. I have one DDS won't work with non-ABS tapes.2. SCMS. SCMS was a foolhardy attempt for the recording industry to try and keep people from copying their music in a bit-perfect format. It hobbled the whole endeavor, and essentially killed DAT as a viable consumer format. Here is a good distillation:https://youtu.be/F4K1QKKPX_g





    On Saturday, September 1, 2018 6:52 PM, Matthew Sohn <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
 

 Here is a link to an informative YouTube video on how to transfer DATs using a DDS drive, created by Jonathan Haynes, creator of the Datheads2Wav Yahoo group.https://youtu.be/faUh4v2VMqIThe group is still active. I think a Yahoo account is required to join, but I am a member, and would be happy to relay any queries. There is also a Dat-Heads facebook group which would be a good resource for anyone wanting to get into DDS extraction (or DAT in general).The software of choice these days is a shareware program called called WaveDat, made by a guy named Efu in Japan (3665 yen). His webpage is in Japanese, but here is a link to the Google translation page:https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=ja&u=http://efu.jp.net/soft/wd/wd.html&prev=searchand the original page:http://efu.jp.net/soft/wd/wd.html(according to his page, the software will work with 32khz recordings.  
Trying to set up one of these systems is not for the faint of heart. You will need to find obsolete drives and scsi hardware, and figure out how to get everything configures correctly. Efu's software will work on Windows 10, but you will need a computer with pci slots (unless someone has developed a scsi>usb solution),and you may need to flash your drive with newer firmware to work with audio,but once you get things up and running, it works like a charm, and you can extract audio faster than realtime. All of the aspects of this endeavor rely on outdated equipment and technology, and require a lot of digging for information, but there are still people doing it, and there are still sources of help available, if you look hard enough I had a Sony STD-5000 running on a scsi bus on an XP machine for a while, and did a number of transfers with it, mostly problem-free. (my biggest fear was getting a tape stuck inside the drive, which thankfully never happened). I have a job coming up preserving a number of DATs, but I think the requirements specify realtime transfers, so I will be using my trusty Sony R-500, and hoping none of the tapes break. I have already been informed that a few of the tapes got chewed in the station's attempts to play them, so I would appreciate any suggestions on how to deal with crinkled tape playback.

-Matt Sohn






 

    On Friday, August 31, 2018 4:45 PM, Corey Bailey <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
 

 I have a setup that does just that. It's installed into a legacy PC that 
runs Win. 2K Pro. I used it to transfer a SFX library (about 200 DAT's) 
for a client. It took some fiddling and has a learning curve (I had to 
use some Command Line statements for Win 2K) but, in the end, it worked 
quite well. It may be easier to install and run on a later Windoze OS. 
I'm unsure whether or not it will work with 32 Bit Files, it would 
depend on the transport, I think. The tapes I transferred were 16 Bit, 
48k. I wouldn't mess with this system unless you have a considerable 
amount of DAT's to transfer. There is a Yahoo group that is at the 
forefront of this. You will probably need a Yahoo account but you can 
find out more at: https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/datheads2wav/info

Cheers!

Corey

Corey Bailey Audio Engineering
www.baileyzone.net

On 8/31/2018 11:57 AM, David Breneman wrote:
> Has anyone tried to extract the audio files from a DAT tape using a computer DDS take drive?  I think most of these had SCSI-2 interfaces.  They are almost certainly heavier-duty than an audio DAT tape drive.  I've seen people cram tapes into them like they were trying to punch their hand through a sheetrock wall, and the drives always took a beating without complaint.
>
> --
> David Breneman
> [log in to unmask]
>