Can you Rip DAT audio? 19
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? "
Ripping from DAT (Score:1)
http://bboard.mp3.com/mp3/ubb/Forum1/HTML/00053
Hope that helped
Audio CDRs from DAT (Score:4)
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/.
Re:Ripping from DAT (Score:1)
to rip a cassette tape, not a DAT.
Basically, if you're in this situation
-- ripping any analog recording -- then
obviously the only way to do this is to play
into a sound card of some sort that'll do the
AD conversion.
But with anything recorded digitally, you obviously shouldn't do this, since you've already got the bits... you just need to get them to
the HD and get something that understands the
format they're written in.
The suggestions below seem good to me.
Re:Ripping from DAT (Score:1)
Basically, if you're in this situation -- ripping any analog recording -- then obviously the only way to do this is to play into a sound card of some sort that'll do the AD conversion.
But with anything recorded digitally, you obviously shouldn't do this, since you've already got the bits... you just need to get them to the HD and get something that understands the format they're written in.
The suggestions in the post below seem good to me.
What about an SB Live!? (Score:1)
Re:Audio CDRs from DAT (Score:1)
The first company I would check out is SEK'D. (http://www.sekd.com/) They have a series of cards called Prodif that allow you to hook your DAT directly to your computer and transfer all tracks simultaneously. (via SPDIF or AES/EBU) The cards also include a basic version of Samplitude, which allows you to remaster and burn directly to CD.
If you have an Alesis ADAT, there is a company called Aardvark that makes the ARC 20/20+ card, which has an ADAT Optical IO interface. It also has an optical interface for Sony Minidisc, if you ever have a need for it. (www.aardvark-pro.com)
If you want 8 channel analog, by far the best deal is the Gadget Labs 8/24 card. (www.gadgetlabs.com) It is 8 channel, 24 bit, and comes with Cool Edit Pro basic (with an upgrade deal for the full version). This is what I use for my recording studio. Just hook it to the buses on your mixer board, pan everything to the seperate buses, and press record. Great stuff. Cool edit has awesome effects, noise reduction, etc. for tweaking your recordings.
Good Luck.
Yes, it is, I've done it in Linux, BUT: (Score:2)
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 [uni-erlangen.de].
- A.P.
--
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
What I've Done (Score:1)
First, naturally, you need a big fat hard drive. SCSI's better, of course, but I have gotten good rips with IDE.
A SoundBlaster Live! with the S/PDIF inputs has worked just fine for me. Some people will say it's no good for professional-quality stuff, but I have no complaints. Besides, a lot of those "professional" cards seem to have other nasty quirks and issues surrounding them. I'd have to hear a side-by-side comparison before I'd be convinced to shell out the extra bucks and deal with the potential extra headaches for one of those cards. My Live! has always done everything I've asked of it without a glitch.
For the recording and mastering, SoundForge with CD Architect has worked like a charm for me. I record a huge
CD Architect: http://www.sonicfoundry.com/Products/ShowProduct.
My musician friend and I have burned dozens of live shows from DAT using this setup and we've been very pleased with the results.
Re:Audio CDRs from DAT (Score:1)
So I have a few questions yet: I've found a Python Archive 4324RP for $285 from DriveStock (any better vendors to recommend?). I've got an Adaptec 2940 SCSI controller. Would I be good to rip w/ this configuration? The DATlib README says something about "'esp' or 'fas' hardware and with audio-firmware." What does this mean? (Or more importantly, does the Python 4324RP/Adaptec 2940 satisfy this requirement? It looks like esp/fas is only needed for fastforwarding the audio DAT anyway (non-crucial). Is this true?
It appears I really need to carefully ask for the audio firmware. Anyone been shipped a Python w/o the audio firmware and had to hassle to get it?
Is there a pointer to a DATlib README.linux (looks like what they've got is still fairly Sun specific, but not horribly hard to do under Linux). If there's linux specific documentation, that'd be great. If not, I hope to have my experiences written up in about a month!
Thanks.
Re:Yes, it is, I've done it in Linux, BUT: (Score:1)
Takes a bit of looking... (Score:2)
- A.P.
--
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
The reason why the SB Live is "no good" (Score:1)
There's a bevy of inexpensive devices (the Midiman CO2 comes to mind) which are capable of reading digital audio in to a machine. Or on the higher end you have things like the Zefiro ZA2 (bad with higher bus speed machines) and any number of high-end cards like the Motu 2408, etc (these guys will set you back a pretty penny and offer capabilities you're probably not interested in though. read: overkill)
Also is the issue of outs, I believe the SB Live only has a coaxial s/pdif in, whereas he might need to come from AES/EBU on XLR, or S/PDIF on optical. I know converters even for optical->coaxial (Fostex COP-2, I think? not sure) run around $85. This plus the cost of a live is enough to purchase something with a better input if they're interested in doing something other than coax.
And now for content... http://www.ncf.carleton.ca/~aa571/dat2wav.htm contains info on reading from DDS drives to wave files.
Look harder (Score:1)
In summary: you can do it, but it ain't easy. Finding a suitable DDS drive is the biggest challenge.
If you have any more, let me know.
Ade_
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