nates@sporobolus.NREL.ColoState.EDU (Nate Sammons) (04/30/91)
hey, I have a question: Is it possible to modify, or sufficiently hack a DAT player (designed for playing music) so that it can be used as a bakup medium?? What is the difference between the DAT's dasigned for DATA and those designed for music, I mean in the recorder/player since the tapes are nearly identical. Specifically, would it be possible to modify Sony's new DAT walkman for use in backups...? E-mail me, or RE: this message... -Nate Sammons <nsammons@lobo.rmhs.colorado.edu> "Deus Ex Machina" "I don't want to be immortal through my work; I want to be immortal through not dying."
bwdavies@rodan.acs.syr.edu (05/01/91)
-----Posted because e-mail bounced!------------------------------------- Hmm. I don't think you can modify a standard consumer DAT deck for use as a backup device. On the other hand, I don't think you can play music/voice DATs on a deck designed to backup computers. The differences I see are: in a consumer deck, you have analog to digital converters for input and digital to analog converters for playback -- these are missing on a backup deck -- and you would have some sort of computer control interface for a backup deck that would not be present on a consumer deck. Even if you were to bypass the A-D stage on a consumer deck (by using a digital input, for instance), you still wouldn't be able to have the computer move the tape around to find the section you needed. Hope this helps! TSD -- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Sam Hill Cabal "Them people'll do anything for money. You'd bwdavies@sunrise.bitnet be surprised. They ain't like us, Doc. bwdavies@rodan.acs.syr.edu They're Christians." -- Seldom Seen Smith
alves@calvin.usc.edu (William Alves) (05/01/91)
A problem you may encounter trying to use music DAT players for data is that DAT players designed for sound use error-correction algorithms that take advantage of the relative linearity (more low frequencies than high) of most sound sources. If you are missing a few samples, they can be interpolated without significantly altering the sound. However, if a few bytes of text, for example, are missing, chances are a waveform interpolation is not the way to go. Computer data storage devices are expected to have a far lower toleration for missing data than music DAT or CD. That's why CD-ROM has a significantly lower capacity than the number of bytes stored on an audio CD.