Can you Rip DAT audio?

Alisdair McDiarmid asks: "I'm working at my family record company, designing a web-interfaced system for creating custom CDs from their entire collection of recordings. Most of the music is already on CD, so reading those tracks in is no problem, but a significant amount is still on Digital Audio Tape. Is it possible to rip music from DATs? "

Comments

Audio CDRs from DAT

[HHaygood]

From the CD-R FAQ:

Buy a card that will allow you to go from DAT to hard disk digitally. Make sure you get one that can handle the same digital standard the DAT recorder uses, i.e. S/PDIF (Sony/Phillips Digital Interface Format, sometimes referred to as "domestic") or AES/EBU ("professional").

Some of the solutions for the PC are the DigiDesign AudioMedia (see http://www.digidesign.com/), the Zefiro Acoustics ZA2 (see http://www.zefiro.com/), the AdB Digital Multiwav Pro (see http://www.adbdigital.com/), the Digital Audio Labs CardD+ (see http://www.digitalaudio.com/products.htm), or the Turtle Beach Fiji (see http://www.tbeach.com/products/fiji.htm). The CardD+ comes highly recommended. There may be newer versions of these products, so be sure to check out the web sites.

Visit http://www.digitalexperience.com/cards.html for a feature comparison of many different models.

A cheap S/PDIF card available from Computer Geeks (http://www.compgeeks.com/) was evaluated by some newsgroup readers. Apparently there were some problems with the physical dimensions of the card (too wide for some PC slots), the documentation is poor, and the voltage level for both input and output was TTL instead of standard S/PDIF. You're probably better off with one of the established brands unless you're sure about what you need.

You should record from the DAT onto your hard drive, and then record the CD from there. If you try to record directly from DAT you'll likely end up with a lot of wasted CD-Rs due to buffer underruns or minor mistakes. You should use Disc-At-Once recording for best results; Jeff Arnold's DAO software is recommended for this on the PC.

One issue you need to be aware of is that some older DAT recorders can only record at 48KHz, while CDs are recorded at 44.1KHz. If this is the case with your equipment, you will have to do a sample rate conversion. The DSP on cards like the ZA2 will do this for you, or you can use an audio editing program like CoolEdit or Sound Forge.

There *are* CD-R drives that have analog inputs, and can record directly from audio sources. See section (5-12).

If you use a DAT and haven't been to the DAT-heads home page, you should definitely check out http://www.atd.ucar.edu/rdp/dat-heads/.

If you want to manipulate audio DATs directly from your computer, you need a DDS drive with special firmware. The SCSI DDS drives that are typically sold for backups don't have the firmware required to handle DAT tapes. Most SGI workstations can do this, and Mac users should check out http://www.demon.co.uk/gallery/StudioDAT.html. If you have an Archive Python DDS drive, check out ftp://ftp.informatik.uni-erlangen.de/pub/DATlib.

An interesting combination of technologies is the DAT-Link from http://www.tc.com/, which connects to the digital connectors on the DAT machine (or MD, DCC, or CD player) and the SCSI interface on a computer. The device can be controlled from other computers on a network.

If you're interested in mastering production audio CDs, you should take a look at http://www.sadie.com/.

Yes, it is, I've done it in Linux, BUT:

[Wakko Warner]

It's possible to rip music from audio DATs, even in Linux. There's a program for Solaris that I managed to get to compile on Linux which happily spat out 1200 MB worth of 44khz, 16 bit audio for me. In one big file.

The problem? You need a certain kind of DAT drive. The ONLY kind of DDS drives that have audio capabilities are Archive Pythons, which are now made by Seagate, formerly by Connor. Any other drive -- I tried it with my Digital DDS-2 drive to confirm it -- absolutely will not work.

The reason? SGI managed to convince Archive, back in the day, to include audio capabilities in the drives they manufactured for them. Ever since then, Pythons have been the only computer DAT drive that'll rip audio.

DATlib, the set of programs you can use on Linux for ripping DAT audio, is available at ftp://ftp.informatik.uni-erlangen.de/ pub/DATlib.

- A.P.
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Takes a bit of looking...

[Wakko Warner]

I looked around all over once I found the drive in the SGI could do audio; I figured, "Okay, if this thing can do it, why can't mine do it at home?" Turns out my Dec drive couldn't, so I swiped the SGI's DDS drive and managed to find some Linux/Solaris software that would handle it. The link I gave is probably one of the more helpful things I've found on the 'net -- there really isn't all that much information available for doing audio with DDS drives. Admittedly, it isn't a very common practice, but it works very well nonetheless, certainly better than hooking a rack-mount DAT player up to even a high-end sound card.

- A.P.
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