I came across this on ebay, seems to be labelled up as a DCC, but the format looks like a standard compact cassette to me. Anyone come across these before?
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That’s obviously not a DCC tape – and even if the tape inside the shell was from a DCC, I feel quite sure that no DCC deck would recognize it as such since there are no holes in the shell that would let it identify itself as such. No proper, officially-released DCC would ever come in a standard analog shell like that.
A DCC would also not advertise itself as “Type I (Normal) Position / Normal Bias (120us EQ)” – nor would it have the “Compact Disc Digital Audio” logo on it. (For that matter, a standard analog cassette wouldn’t have that logo either; that logo was/is trademarked and can only be put on an actual Red Book-compliant audio CD.)
Also – while Discogs.com does show that album was released in DCC:
Dire Straits – Money For Nothing (DCC) - Discogs
the track listing shown is different; the proper DCC release has 12 tracks, while this only shows 11, and the tracks are in a different order.
Discogs doesn’t even have a listing that matches this one in terms of label (“Digitape”), release# (“F.29”), or even the track order. So, I’m pretty sure this is just a standard analog cassette, and a bootleg or knock-off one at that.
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I thought as much, but I also don’t remember knock-offs being that sophisticated back in the 90s, what with the printing on the cassette housing…
Maybe from the Far East and they were throwing every logo and related words they could find at it…
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I have seen this a few times before. This is not in any way a Digital Compact Cassette.
Sellers often do not know the difference and when they see Digitape (left top corner on the cassette), they assume it is a DCC. This is a regular analog cassette.
This is obviously from Thailand. I found this on Discogs:
Madonna - Greatest Hits Collection Vol. I
Label is: Digitape
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Also a regular cassette by Digitape.
Yes, but an unofficial release 
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I seem to remember that in the 80’s and 90’s there was a lot of crap available in tape format… anyone recall Yoko tapes? They shed off oxide in the box! Horrible nock offs… this dire straits album is of the same heritage… horrible! So one qualification springs to mind: FAKE!
I think they used the CDDA logo and they called this tape “Digital Compact Cassette” because maybe the master used for duplicating those cassettes is an audio CD.
So, it’s not a DCC as we know it but a compact cassette made from a “digital” master.
Plus, a real DCC would have the DCC logo on it.