Re: [ARSCLIST] Digital Audio Preservation Question

[Dave Rice <dave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

You could quality control a DAT recording by using an audio enabled  
Digital Data Storage drive to read the tape and check the error logs.  
Software like DATXtract with log all the read errors, what timecode  
they occurred at, and dump the metadata for that recording as well.  
We've used DDS drives to read off the contents of several hundred DAT  
tapes and found error rates comparable to miniDV.

David Rice
Archivist
Democracy Now!
100 Lafayette St., Rm 604
New York, NY 10013
Phone: (212) 431-9090 x811
Fax: (212) 431-8858
Email: dave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx



On Apr 15, 2008, at 1:19 PM, Jim Sam wrote:

> At 09:15 AM 4/15/2008, Richard Hess wrote:
> > At 12:56 PM 2008-04-14, Don Cox wrote:
> >
> > > I suspect the biggest audio problem in the future will be DAT.
> >
> > There is good and bad news in this regard.
> >
> > Good: We are finding that by and large DAT tapes are lasting  
> > longer than expected
>
> Not in my experience.  As I noted in my talk at the conference last  
> month, in the archives, we're seeing a decent amount of errors on  
> DATs no more than 8 years old.  In my personal collection, I have a  
> DAT purchased and first recorded in 2002 whose life span was less  
> than four years (and this was unique material I'd really, really  
> like to hear again).  When you can't have 100% confidence in, say,  
> a four year old recording absolutely playing back flawlessly,  
> that's a huge problem.
>
> Jim