Thanks to the DCC Museum and their dilgence in keeping the format alive, I’ve purchased most of their new releases. Whilst they are intended to be played, (which I do), I’m conscious of my ageing equipment, (DCC600 and DCC730), and don’t want to damage the tapes. So I decided to make backup copies to other formats. Namely, DAT and MD using the digital output from my DCC730. I was highly expecting a SCMS copy restriction, but no. Was able to copy them digitally to either MD or DAT, and they sound great! Is the lack of SCMS nonsense because they are new “bespoke” releases or because I am making a first generation copy? I haven’t tried copying a commercial release from the 90’s but would expect them to come up with a no-copy flag?
The releases by the DCC Museum are of course subject to copyright, just like everything else. We get full permission (license) to release the tapes that we make.
We also intend to give our customers what they expect: A digital recording of excellent quality, that can be backed up to other media in case the original DCC cassette develops a problem. That is fair use.
Because of the unique way that we master our tapes (at least the last few years, where we generate our tapes directly from files generated by software), our tapes are currently marked as “Copy OK”, so you can make a copy and use that copy to make more copies. However, a 16 bit copy of a DCC may not sound as good as the original because we encode with 18, 24 or 32 bit resolution. Also the text information on a DCC cannot currently be copied (and in fact cannot even be seen by any recorders before the 3rd generation). We may change this in the future.
===Jac