Can a PC-DAT Drive be used as an ADAT??

  • Thread starter Thread starter Marci
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Marci

New member
Here's one for y'all...

I have set beside me a HP Surestore DAT8 C1529K
It's a SCSI 4/8Gb Dat Backup drive, but the question is this:

We all know that you don't need an analogue audio cable to listen to CD Music on a PC, as a fast PC can digitally extract down the data cable... what I want to know is is there any software that allow me to use the same principles with this DAT drive, in effect converting it to a stereo 4mm ADAT?? There's no reason why it shouldn't be possible as what gets written to tape (and in what format) is governed by software, not the drive. All the drive does is write what it's told to write... so if you could tell it to write audio then it would... but does anyone know of any software that'll let me!!! If anyone knows if it can be converted into a 4/8ch ADAT then that'd be even better...

PC Spec:
I-Will XP333-R Mobo, Athlon XP2000+ CPU
768Mb PC2700 DDR Ram
80Gb UATA133 7200rpm Maxtor HDD
24x10x40 CD-RW (4 of)
Hoontech DSP24 Soundcard with DSP2000 C-Port

OS: Windows XP Pro
Recording with: Cubase VST/32 5.1.1

Cheers!
 
Great Help... any reason why other than the realtime play speeds etc?? I don't need it to play from the dat, just to dump a stereo wav onto it in a format that I can take out and put into a generic stereo DAT and get it to play succesfully...
 
You can write .wavs to a DAT drive with no problem. Transfering that data to an audio DAT machine would be tricky. To make a digital transfer it would have to be a real time playback from the computer through a S/PDIF card to the audio DAT machine.
 
On an aside -- DAT and ADAT are 2 different (and non-interchangeable) formats.

DAT is a 2-channel mixdown format -- ADAT is an 8-channel multitrack format.


Bruce
 
OK, ok, ok...

what I want to do is, dump a stereo 2 track WAV file to 4mm DAT via a PC Hewlett Packard DAT Drive (SCSI) and then be able to take the tape straight out of that drive and bung it into a bog standard stereo 4mm DAT Player of the Sony Kind rather than the PC kind. That's all... just referring to the 2track DAT as ADAT to differentiate it as audio DAT rather than pc-data DAT... anyways,

by the looks of things it can't be done so we'll leave it at that... ta anyhoo!
 
ADAT you cannot do. Theoretically, there is a 4-track mode standardised with DAT tape, but never heard about anything (body) using it. If I remember the tapes runs double speed and the sampling is 32kHz/12-bit like LP mode.

On the other hand, some PC Dat drives can be used to read DAT tapes and extract to wave. For lenghty discussions, tips and usable brands, softs etc go to DAT-heads:

http://www.solorb.com/dat-heads/

and search the digests.
 
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