First, thanks much to the DCC Museum for the repairing of my DCC recorder.
DCC was a really cool format, and it’s too bad that it didn’t take off much more.
Well, something a bit weird happens with my pre-recorded tapes.
When I put a (fully rewinded) pre-recorded DCC (e.g.: P.M. Dawn album), the recorder forward the tape a bit then rewind to read the TOC (nothing special until here…).
Once the tape is recognized, I have access to all the infos about the album (total time and tracks, album name, song name) but not the artist info… I have to push play to see the name of the artist (after few seconds).
The same problem happens to all the tape I tried.
But if the tape is not fully rewinded and I put it into the recorder, everything works (the artist infos as well…).
It’s not a big deal, but did you have some trick to solve this problem?
As Ralf advise me, I never play analog tape on this player, only DCC’s.
Thanks for advance for your reply and so sorry for my poor english (as I’m French…).
I have seen this before, but mostly it will take time to read all the TOC information. Not just one specific detail in that situation. There is no easy trick, but I would also not indicate it as a big problem. Head cleaning could help, but since your unit has been serviced, I doubt it will make a difference.
I started giving a different answer, but I just tried with a DCC tape on one of my own decks (DCC 730) and I saw the same thing:
When I loaded a prerecorded tape that was rewound to the beginning, after reading the tape it showed no text info for any item (title, artist, album).
When I pushed the Next button to go to the beginning of track 1, it stopped at the right place but there was still no text info.
When I rewound the tape and pressed play, it skipped the first 15 seconds or so (as expected), and started playing the first song. If I stopped it right when the song started playing, there was no text info,
If I would keep playing, it would show the song title on the display, and the text button would show all the information.
If I push Eject and then load the same tape (while it’s in the middle of a song), it reads the tape for a short time and then displays all text info
If I use the Next/Previous buttons to go to a song in the Table of Contents, and hit the Text button right after it starts playing that song (or if I hit the Stop button right after it starts playing the song), it knows the song title but not the artist or album title.
So I think what you’re seeing is normal.
On a prerecorded tape, information such as the song title, artist and album title are recorded in the same tracks as the music. That means if the tape is running, and all heads are operating as intended, you will hear the music and you will see the text info. If something is wrong, you will hear no music and you will see no text info. If you see a track title but not the artist, it means the artist name isn’t encoded in the information on the tape (very unlikely). All this information is read by the recorder continuously while playing, and it will take a few seconds to get all the information. The information is stored continuously on the entire tape so it will eventually show up on a (correctly encoded) prerecorded tape.
It’s true that if you insert a tape, it will read the tape for a few seconds and will then let you fast forward or reverse to a different song, because it has read the Table of Contents (which only contains song titles). But apparently when it starts playing the selected song, the recorder knows that everything it knew about the previously playing track, is not valid anymore, so it wipes its memory (it knows which song it’s playing now so that information is not wiped). Then it takes a few seconds to load the information from tape again, unless you push Stop of course.
So I guess, according to your reply, that the artist info is stored into the “audio-stream”, and not into the 9th track, because as you said, when I press “play” this info appears after few seconds.
3rd generation recorders (and later) can store user-programmed track titles and other information in the 9th track but the 9th track is mostly used for markers that can be detected during fast-forward and rewind.