I woild like to start this thread about DCC-Studio to list here found issues, tips and questions to work with it.
Yesterday I’ve finished with my first DCC-175 repair and made my first full-tape recording using DCC-Studio. So here are some issues I’ve found. They’re listed in no particular order, regardless of severityю
Remaining timer in the application is reset after SideA->B change (not affecting the process).
Cannot perform “APPEND” operation using DCC-Studio. If I try to perform recording for example starting from “Next recorded marker”, then application successfully finds the End marker, then it tries to play back some portion after it to find actual track number and timer information, but it cannot do this. workaround - record 5 seconds of silence using manual DCC175 control in Append mode, after that re-record this track using DCC-Studio - re-recording works well in this case.
If consumer tape does not contain any marker at the end of side A (for example recording was done on 1st or 2nd gen when revers occurs by reflective strip on the tape), then DCC-Studio cannot get “Tape information” from such tape. It is stuck at the end of Side A continuously adding last track on that side. It looks like this: Found track - FF until tape end - Stuck at the end - .Rewind until previous marker - Repeat. As a workaround it is possible to try to write reverse marker at the very end of side A, but it might make the last seconds of Side A and first seconds of Side B to be missed.
AUX Tags written by DCC-Studio seem to contain padding spaces instead of zeros (or some other bytes). This leads to the behavior that tag is long and scrolls on the DCC730/951 into spaces.
Please fill in this list if you know about other weird behavior of DCC-Studio.
And now question from my side. I didn’t understand how can I create an “image” of a consumer tape to make a copy of it using DCC-Studio. I can “grab” the whole side as a “Track”, I can get “Tape information” but I don’t understand how to create compilation out of this tape. Even if I open this tape in the Editor, it does not have any markers…
Unfortunately DCC studio isn’t smart enough to use the markers to separate the tracks. You have to record the entire side of the tape tape to disk, and then use the wave editor to find the start of each track. The best way ( if I remember correctly) is to put markers and then use the menu to select " from start of track to marker" and then use Cut to delete the section of music. Then create a new editor window and Paste the section of music and save it as a separate trk file with artist and title.
Repeat that for all the songs. Then you can make a compilation with all the tracks and record that to tape. However, even if you set the " pause between tracks" to zero, it will still insert a couple of silent frames onto the tape between tracks while it’s closing one file and opening the next. So you can’t record continuous music with track markers, unfortunately; you have to record the continuous music as one track and manually add the track markers later.
Thank you very much for the confirmation, it is sad that DCC-Studio cannot do proper dumping with markers. And you’re right about gapless recording - I’ve tried to create such a tape - gaps for about 0.5-1sec are present. So the best way to record such content seems to use digital input of any DCC deck (this will also allow to put track marks from CD), and then perform track labeling using DCC-Studio (Tape information read and then write back). But this method will give trailing spaces at the end of recorded tags. So much space for a new DCC-toolbox hehe
You can record continuous music by using the wave editor and pasting all the tracks together and recording them as if they are a single track. Unfortunately it won’t record a marker except at the beginning. In most cases it’s not a big deal but it would be nice to have more control over the recording of markers.
I’ve tried the following way: write from CD with track marks. Then tried to perform “Write Tape Information”. It worked but with issues. Due to head clogging or something else wrong with my DCC-175, first three tracks have missed all AUX marks (so no timer, no mark at all). Starting from fourth track it worked as expected. One more bug in DCC-Studio. If we have tape with track numbering on side B starting from 1, DCC-Studio will renumber all of then that they will continue numbering of side A… So many bugs there. I’m wondering if you had a chance to look into sources, if it is possible to build them now… If yes, I believe many bugs could be fixed (just to have “clean” DCC-Studio to work as expected). If sources could be somehow shared, I can try to make build env and try to fix some of issues I’ve found. Anyway it’s better to start own project from scratch, but I can also try to help to fix some happening issues there…
