DAT's the trick for speedy audio swaps

-- EDN, 3/15/2001

Put your S/PDIF (Sony/Philips Digital Interface) cables away. There's now an easier way to transfer audio information between a DAT (digital-audio-tape) deck and your PC's hard drive at faster than real-time rates. S/PDIF is not only more cumbersome to implement but also no faster than real time (see "Digital audio gets an audition," EDN, Jan 4, 2001, pg 48). Instead, consider a $200 Seagate (http://www.seagate.com)-developed and Silicon Graphics (http://www.sgi.com)-branded DDS (digital-data-storage)-2 DAT drive from Mashek Consulting, along with a copy of the $50 DAT2WAV software from Computall Services or Eduard Ungemach's $100 VDAT software.

Command-line-driven DAT2WAV currently supports transfers only to the PC, although the developer has a fuller featured version in beta-testing form, and it works well on my PC. VDAT operates via a Windows graphical user interface and is particularly easy to use if you know how to read German. And the Seagate drive doubles as a fast (SCSI-2) tape backup for your computer's hard drive.

Computall Services, aa571@ncf.ca, http://www.ncf.ca/~aa571/dat2wav.htm.

Mashek Consulting, 1-763-434-4998, http://www.mashek.com/SGIspecials.

VDAT, su001433@access.uni-dortmund.de, http://homepages.compuserve.de/eungemach/main.html.

-by Brian Dipert