[jesprenj]

Public science and art academy in my country recorded a lot of interviews on DAT digital tapes, which are now in the process if being digitised. The casette reader, however, does not report error metadata via any reasonable means, so it was modified a long time ago to report errors to an external device.

Wires are connected directly to the PCB of the casette player so that with the help of the external device, metadata about the errors when reading can be stored. But the external device (DATerr/DATerrMON/DATerrLOG) is ancient. It's not mentioned in Google's search results, luckily there was a copy of the printed manual somewhere.

It talks via RS-232 to a regular office computer from the ninetees running windows 95 to an application running in DOS mode.

It's time to modernize the setup, as currently the win95 PC's disk already failed and had to be replaced. Luckily the program works perfectly under DosBOX, but the environment has to be tweaked a bit (NumLock must be on, or the program hangs, etc :))

Edit: I said windows 93 instead of (probably) 95.

[snvzz]

>on DAT digital tapes, which are now in the process if being digitised.

DAT tapes are, as you mention, already storing digital data to begin with. Rather than "digitised", the data should be copied to modern storage as-is.

[justsomehnguy]

My guess (never worked with DAT) is what they have them in audio format, not DDS, which is digital but...

Judging on some cursory search[0] the only way to transfer the audio is to hook the drive through S/PDIF and play the whole tape. Looks like the ability to treat audio as the data (similar to the way we can treat AudioCDs as just a data disk filled with PCM) is rare and not quite the official [1]

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20071007220855/http://homepage.n...

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20071102094856/http://web.ncf.ca...

[snvzz]

The drives with DDS support might be rare, but they're the only correct way to extract audio for preservation.

Open Source software exists[0] for the purpose.

0. https://github.com/andrew-taylor/read_dat

[justsomehnguy]

The other way - a DDS drive with DAT support.

Anyway, you now need to acquire such drive, get to @jesprenj institution, tell them they are doing it wrong, threw out the current setup, replace the drive and the 'recording' station....

With a 30 y.o. tech which is obsolete for 20 years it's all.. questionable.

[jesprenj]

I was told they are capturing digital data. But I have no idea how, I was just trying to make sense of the error stream coming from the hacked drive.

Next time I'll check if they use SPDIF or what. But the drive is a consumer-grade Sony. Shame I didn't take note of the model.

[jesprenj]

When I was there, I saw that they played the tape at regular speed, not slower or faster. The drive's time counter was steadily increasing.

[jesprenj]

Reading the quoted sentence really is weird (:

[Fatnino]

Are you sure you mean windows 93?

Not, say, 95?

[jesprenj]

Lol, perhaps I got it confused with the website https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_93

I have a disk dump on my server. This is worth checking.

[jesprenj]

Of course, it's 95:

http://upload.4a.si/d/logow.bmp