[rescue] Playing and Recording music on DAT tapes

[jdboyd at jdboyd.zill.net]

On Sat, Nov 29, 2003 at 12:47:49AM -0500, Dave McGuire wrote:

>   I'd gotten pissed off by the time I had a stack of five DAT drives 
> that didn't work right...some hung the SCSI bus, some ate tapes, etc.  
> Eventually I wound up connecting a piece of RCA-RCA coax between the 
> DA-30's digital output and the digital input on my Octane and sucking 
> them in (and doing some editing) that way.  It was pretty trivial to do 
> it that way and I kicked myself for not having taken that approach 
> earlier in the process.
> 
>   If memory serves, the Indigo2 has digital audio I/O, but on a 1/8" 
> connector instead of the more standard RCA jacks.  I've never used that 
> interface, though, and I don't know how well it works on that hardware. 
>  But with Octanes being so unbelievably cheap right now, I might 
> suggest it'd be better for you to grab one on eBay, move all your stuff 
> over from your Indigo2 and give it away, and suck the data in from the 
> DA-30 like I did.

Although, it might be worth $5 at radio shack to find out if he can just
use the 3.5mm digital connector on the I2 if he is otherwise happy with
that machine.

However, if I understood him correctly, he doesn't actually have a DA30,
it's his friend in the studio who owns it.

My understanding is that SGI badged DDS1 and DDS2 drives will just work
on SGIs for audio extraction.  Everything else is asking for trouble, so
if you have to buy something it might be best to spend the extra dough
for a DAT tape player instead of a DAT tape drive.

For instance:
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=2575215875&category=3278
shoud do the trick for playback just fine (I expect that as a consumer
model it will have some federally mandated unpleasantries for recording
stuff) for what looks like under $100 with 3 hours to go.  I expect you
should definately be able to get something for under $300.  You could
also just rent a DAT player from shop.