Jac,
Thanks for the tip on the tag info in the file causing noise. That is exactly what I encountered. All of my files have artwork ,tag and Replay Gain info embedded in them. The reason that I need to use the -R option is that all the Hi-Res Audio files are at least 24 bit / 96kHz or higher. So, I’m downsampling the audio not upsampling it. As I type this, I just realized that I never specified the bitrate in the converted files. It will need to be downsampled to 18 bit. I will take your advice and perform all of the conversions when I export the files to wav and dispense with the unnecessary parameters in mp2enc. That seems like a more logical route.
I’ll be mindful of the 8.3 names too. For the time being, I’m running mp2enc natively on my Mac but running DCCU and DCC Studio file conversions in a Windows XP Virtual Box VM on the same Mac. Tape writing is being performed on a Dell D600 running Windows ME. So far, I haven’t had any issues with long file names causing issues when being converted to 8.3 names. It might just be peculiar to my setup. But, I will keep an eye on it for conflicts.
Thank you so much for putting the time and effort into this project. I’ll be looking forward to the changes that you will be making.
I am working on amazing progress, too. I hope you are doing okay, would love to talk to you about it, hit me up when you have any time to spare at any time.
FYI…
I performed a super cheap drive upgrade to my DCC 175 laptop. The Dell D600 laptop that I’m using in conjunction with the DCC 175 has an old PATA/IDE interface and the drive was developing issues. While true SSD hard disk replacements are available for IDE they are seem expensive to me. I found a very inexpensive Mustpoint - SD Memory Card to IDE 2.5" 44 Pin Male Adapter Converter on Amazon for US $15. I had a 128GB SD card that I installed in it. Windows ME doesn’t use the SmartDrv like Windows 95/98/98SE does. It uses entries in the system.ini to control the [vcache] settings which perform the same function. As a test, I blanked out this section and wrote several tapes. I did not get any buffer under-run errors because the access times were fast. I realize that SD has a finite write cycle (SanDisk says 100,000 writes typical) but this shouldn’t be much of an issue since most of what this workstation does is read data and write it to tape. I’ll report back after testing this config for a longer period of time.
Finally! I’ve been playing around a bit with mp2enc and the new DCCU. My source WAV originates from a 24-bit 96kHz FLAC file and is therefore a 24-bit 96kHz WAV file as well.
However…
When using:
mp2enc -v 1 -b 384 -p 1 -r -o 01.wav 01.mp1
… I’m getting a somewhat distorted or dampened MP1 file that seems to miss out on large parts of the audio. I listened to it on Foobar and VLC.
And if I’m trying to use DCCU 3.1, it won’t do more than mentioning “0 frames” and seems to hang.
The first option is a lower-case L (for Layer). WIthout it, you get an MP2 file which is not compatible with DCC.
By default it will use 48000 Hz stereo but 44.1kHz or 32kHz are also available as an option.
Don’t forget to use the ‘<’ in front of the input file name. The program gets its input from stdin which makes sense on *nix environments but not in Windows. I will probably make a modified version some day that works differently. I will also eventually integrate the DCCU functionality into it.
The correct command for DCCU is:
DCCU inputfile1 [inputfile2…]
The command line syntax for DCCU is also not very useful and may also change in the future.
DCCU automatically generates an MP1 file if the input file name has an MPP extension, and generates MPP and LVL and TRK files if you the input file name has an MP1 extension. The LVL file is a dummy file; you won’t see the audio levels in DCC-Studio. I’ll fix this in the future.
The reason your DCCU version doesn’t work is probably because you are trying to convert an MP2 file so it can’t find any MP1 frames. You also don’t have the latest version (currently 3.2).
