[rescue] Playing and Recording music on DAT tapes

[Sheldon T. Hall]

I have some old studio master tapes (yeah, I was in a band, once) that I'd
like to have converted to some digital medium.  I have a friend who is a
composer/arranger, if he could play the tapes in his home studion and burn
CDs from them.

It turns out he doesn't burn CDs because the music biz actually sends the
stuff around on DAT tapes.  He says ...

> My DAT machine is the standard professional workhorse - a Tascam DA-30.
It
> uses standard DAT tapes and can record at sampling frequencies of either
48kHz,
> 44.1kHz, or 32kHz from digital inputs.  It's an older model from the mid
> 90's.  I recently had one of my DATs converted to CD by the friend I
mentioned in
> my last email and he played my DAT through a newer but similar style DAT
> machine in his studio with no problem.

Now, my Indigo^2 has a program called "DATman", which purports to be able to
play DAT tapes.  Is it going to play them through any DDS drive, or is it
one of those SGI deals like the audio-over-SCSI that only works with certain
CD drives, and only on the internal SCSI bus?

The DATman man page indicates that it'll play 'em, and even produce files on
disk, but is silent on the hardware details.  If it mentions the format of
the files it produces, I can't find that, either.  Has anyone ever tried it?

-Shel
--
Sheldon T. Hall
shel at cmhc.com
206-780-7971 (CMHC)
206-842-2858 (Home)