Through the Nineteen Nineties, music was virtually invariably saved on CDs or cassette tapes. When the brand new millennium got here round, bodily codecs grew to become out of date as music moved first to MP3 recordsdata, and later to community streams. However just a few years earlier than that huge transition, there have been a number of makes an attempt at changing the growing old cassette and CD codecs with one thing extra trendy. You may bear in mind the likes of MiniDisc and Tremendous Audio CD, however there have been just a few different contenders round.

The Digital Compact Cassette, or DCC, was one such format. Launched by Philips in 1992 as a substitute for the analog audio cassette, it failed to realize traction out there and disappeared earlier than most individuals had even heard of it. Not so for [Jac Goudsmit] and [Ralf Porankiewicz] nonetheless, who’ve spent years researching all points of the DCC system and shared a number of the leads to their 2022 Supercon discuss.

[Ralf] is the curator of the DCC Museum in Cathedral Metropolis, California, which owns examples of all DCC tools ever launched, in addition to a number of gadgets that by no means made it to market. He additionally goals to doc the historical past of audio recording and DCC’s contribution to it, which fits additional than you may suppose. For instance, the audio compression format used within the DCC system, known as PASC, was an early model of what would later turn out to be MP3 – although most histories of audio compression ignore this reality.

[Jac], for his half, made an intensive examine of all of the technical options of the DCC format. He has written quite a few articles about his findings, first within the DCC FAQ and later by sustaining the related Wikipedia articles. He’s operating a number of tasks geared toward protecting the format alive, typically in collaboration with the DCC Museum.

[Jac] and [Ralf] start their discuss with a short introduction to the system and its media. DCC gamers had been designed to be suitable with analog audio cassettes, so DCC cartridges are the identical primary dimension, although with a special sort of tape inside. Playback gadgets comprise a posh set of magnetic heads to learn both the analog alerts from basic tapes, or the digital information saved on DCCs.

One distinctive function of DCC is Interactive Textual content Switch Service, or ITTS, which is a separate information space on the tape that may maintain further data like tune lyrics and even easy animations. It was meant to be displayed on gamers that supported it, however no such gadgets had been ever launched. Fortunately, [Jac] and [Ralf] managed to discover a uncommon ITTS decoder system utilized in a tape mastering facility, and had been capable of reveal the contents of this “secret monitor”, which is current on all prerecorded tapes, for the primary time.

Consumer-recorded tapes by no means had any ITTS information, and differed from prerecorded ones in a number of different methods, too. The obvious distinction was that professionally-made tapes may very well be listed by tune title, whereas home-made ones may solely bounce to trace numbers. [Jac] and [Ralf] are nonetheless working to allow all of the skilled options on home-made tapes as effectively, via plenty of software program and {hardware} tasks.

Probably the most primary software program wanted is an encoder and decoder for the PASC format, which [Jac] developed from current MP1 sofware. However to discover a number of the extra obscure {hardware} options, he needed to reverse-engineer a number of totally different DCC gamers. This led him to find many attention-grabbing half-finished options: the ITTS information sector is one instance, however he additionally came upon that some gamers ship ready-to-use VU meter information to their entrance panel, despite the fact that they’re unable to show that data.

[Jac] was additionally one of many first folks to purchase the DCC-175 transportable DCC participant when it was launched in 1995. This was the one DCC participant ever offered with a pc interface, permitting direct switch of digital audio between a pc and a DCC tape. The parallel port interface and its accompanying Home windows 9x software program are utterly out of date and unusable with trendy PCs, so [Jac] is engaged on immediately accessing the information from the DCC-175 via a customized cable. He’s making good progress: he already discovered {the electrical} interface and wrote some software program that allows him to manage the tape recorder immediately.

We will’t assist however be impressed by the quantity of effort each [Jac] and [Ralf] have put into understanding and documenting all of the intricacies of a long-obsolete audio format. Because of their efforts, we will nonetheless recognize the spectacular expertise behind DCC – even when it by no means got here near changing its analog cousin.