From: "Christopher Stos-Gale"
Subject: Adventures in the world of audio DAT
Date: Tue, 29 Apr 2003 17:01:26 +0100

I thought this might be a useful addition to your (excellent) website.

Some months ago, I looked into the possibility of buying a DDS drive and
converting it to read audio DATs. I ended up purchasing a Seagate CTD-8000
which transpired to be originally a drive in a DELL computer. I downloaded
the 5AC firmware and a program to revert to the original firmware from
http://www.xs4all.nl/~heemsker/fup/. Updating was a piece of cake. A child
could have done it. Just had to run the program from a real (dos disk)
prompt. The software to revert to your original firmware also worked, except
that lost the DELL ID (not really a problem!). The tricky bit appeared to be
getting software that worked. None of the commercial demos I tried (VDAT and
others) worked, and I wouldn't have been able to fork out the $100 or so for
such software anyway. However, I did find some free no-frills software that
did the job. Here is a direct link to DatDeck.
http://www.zianet.com/jgray/dat/files/Setup.zip This software will PLAY DAT
tapes (badly) but do little else. HOWEVER Some great man called Marty
Gulaian has altered this software so it will dump all or some of the 
audio on a tape into a wav file:
http://www.zianet.com/jgray/dat/files/ddeckexe.zip It's very basic but it
WORKS and at 2x speed on my drive! It even managed to read parts of a
damaged tape which a professional player could not!!! This program is open
source so if anyone knows what they're doing they could make this a fully
working program! So it is decidedly possible to read audio DAT tapes on a
DDS drive, despite what the people at Seagate claim. (I received a couple of
almost offensive emails from their technical support team on the matter who
told me it wasn't possible and they certainly would not have anything to do
with it!) Oh, and the drive also works perfectly as a DDS-2 backup device.

Chris Stos-Gale