Why don’t we get together and order new blank DCC cassettes from the few blank cassette manufacturers like National Audio?
That’s the magic in DCC - it based on the analog compact cassette. I know it is not economical, but who said that DCC is economical?
It’s not that easy. DCC tape can’t just be regular Ferro tape like the many types of tape that are manufactured today.
The coercitivity must be low enough that the tiny DCC heads can change the magnetism of the particles on the tape, which means it has to be a chrome(like) tape; however, the chemicals that are required to make chrome tape and the side products of chrome tape production are now banned in most countries as far as i know.
Also, the size of the magnetic particles on DCC tape must be very small because DCC recorders basically use 96 kHz signals to record information, and the tracks are very small. This is why manufacturers used the same formula as video tape to produce DCC tape.
So the bottom line is: There will probably never be new DCC tape.
I expect to do some research in the future to try and make regular Ferro or chrome or metal audio tape work with DCC, possibly by changing the recording format. But the heads are of course also a problem: the only source of DCC heads is existing recorders. Unavoidably, the number of existing DCC recorders “in the wild” is dwindling; people may still have some in their attics but are likely to throw them away when they find them; after all, with capacitor leakage and belt deterioration, they simply die of age and those who still have a recorder but aren’t using them, are probably also those who aren’t aware that our group exists and that almost all DCC recorders with aging problems can be repaired.
=== Jac
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I have an idea, to cut the VHS video tape close to 3.78 mm and set it in the ddc box, I think it could work. It can only be a bias problem. If anyone can tell if they have tried something similar.
The tape is a standard videochrome tape: chromium dioxide- or cobalt- doped ferric-oxide, 3-4 µm thick in a total tape thickness of 12 µm. As in analogue cassettes, the tape is 3.78 mm wide, and is bi-directional.
Like this Cutting and writing a VHS tape
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We thought of that too, and we expect that it would work. No need to adjust the bias or anything; DCC tape was literally made from the same tape stock as video tape.
The problem is that you would need to cut the tape with a high amount of precision, over a long length. That means you probably need a purpose-built machine for it.
I also thought of modifying a DCC mechanism to use e.g. the tape from a miniDV cassette or a DAT cassette. I think those are 4mm. Unfortunately I also think they use metal tape which probably won’t work.
The bottom line is: These seem like simple solutions but they present many practical problems related to mechanics, and though I do have some knowledge about (and am interested in) those operations, I don’t have a workshop with high precision cnc tools or whatever. And I think my time is better spent solving problems that are related to electronics and programming.
===Jac
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A question for Jac, the analog recording on the cassette, can it be transferred to an sd card or hard disk, and thus avoid the dcc cassette, which is a big problem.
Or that the signal before converting to analog for the cassette is transferred to digital form on the SD card.
If all 8 channels were recorded on an sd card with the help of a small controller type Andruno esp32, and thus brought new life without a cassette?
You wouldn’t record the 8 data tracks directly, First of all, that would make the decoding more complicated and secondly, there is a lot of redundancy so it takes up much too much space. And at the point where you pick up the data from each head, the signal is still analog.
The 8 main tracks of a DCC cassette essentially contain an MP1 audio track interleaved with SYSINFO data. The 9th track contains AUXINFO data. All that data gets separated in the DCC player by the chipset; the MP1 audio stream goes to the audio decoding chips via an I2S bus and the SYSINFO and AUXINFO go to the built-in microcontroller on an L2 or L3 bus (which is compatible with SPI).
What I want to do is to connect a fast microcontroller like the Teensy 4.x to the I2S bus and the L3 bus, and let my microcontroller store the data on an SD card. You can nowadays get those with enough capacity to store all DCC’s that were ever made on a single card, so it can just be inside your DCC recorder without the need to remove and reinsert it. Or you can transfer files to and from a computer via USB. Either way, you won’t need cassettes anymore.
===Jac
Intriguing as this may be, it just wouldn’t be the same. 
-Philip.
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