Digital Compact Cassette
There was only one DCC-recorder that had the capability of being connected to, and controlled by a computer: the DCC-175. It was a portable recorder that was developed in Japan (unlike most of the other Philips recorders which were developed in The Netherlands and Belgium), and looked very similar to the other portables available from Philips and Marantz at the time: the DCC-130 (player) and the DCC-170. The DCC-175 was sold only in the Netherlands, and was available separately or in a package with the "PC-link" data cable which could be used to connect the recorder to a printer port of an IBM compatible PC. Only small amounts were made of both recorder and cable, leaving many people searching for one or both at the time of the demise of DCC. The cable contained a couple of custom chips that were made especially for this purpose, which made it impossible for people who owned a DCC-175 but no PC-link cable to make their own. Also, even though the outside of the DCC-170 was similar to the DCC-175, they were radically different on the inside so it wasn't possible to make a 175 out of a 170.
The PC-link cable package included software to use the cable on an IBM-compatible PC, running under Windows 3.1. The software consisted of:
- DCC-Backup for Windows, a backup program
- DCC-Studio, a sound recorder and editor for Windows
- A DCC tape database program that worked together with DCC-Studio
Philips also provided a DOS backup application via their BBS, and later on, they provided an upgrade to the DCC-Studio software to fix some bugs and provide better compatibility with Windows 95 which had come out just before the release of the DCC-175. The software also works with Windows 98 but not with any later versions of Windows.
The backup programs for DOS as well as Windows didn't support long file names. Also, because the tape ran at its usual speed, it took 90 minutes to record approximately 250 Megabytes of uncompressed data. These properties made the backup programs relatively uninteresting for users.
The DCC-Studio application however was a useful application that made it possible to copy audio from tape to hard disk and vice versa, edit track titles on the PC keyboard (so all lower-case and upper-case characters and symbols were available) and write them to tape all at once, edit audio by cutting and pasting fragments, and automatically record mix-tapes. The program was capable of writing the track information to the tape while it was recording the audio, which was a big advantage over the two-step process (record audio first, then edit each track title) which was involved in regular CD-to-DCC recording. Also, because a regular keyboard was used to enter track information, it was possible to enter lower-case characters and symbols that weren't available on stationary recorders.
The DCC-Studio program used the recorder as playback and recording device, it didn't use the PC's sound card (something that not even every PC had in those days). Working with the PASC data without the need to compress and decompress it also saved a lot of hard disk space, and most computers in that time would have a hard time encoding and decoding PASC data in real-time anyway. However, many users complained that they would have liked to have the possibility of using WAV files, and Philips sent registered users a floppy disk in the mail, containing programs to convert a WAV file to PASC and vice versa. Unfortunately this conversion was extremely slow but it was later discovered that the PASC files were simply MPEG-1 Audio Layer I files that used a hardly-used, hardly-documented padding feature from the MPEG standard to make all frames the same length, so it was easy to convert PASC to PCM and vice versa.
Because of the possibility to create new tapes with DCC-Studio, regardless of the source they were recorded from, the DCC-175/PC-Link cable/DCC-Studio combination effectively circumvented the SCMS copy protection scheme that all digital audio recording devices for consumers are supposed to have. It is possible that this raised some eyebrows in Philips' legal department, and that this is the reason why DCC-175 and PC-link were never sold outside the Netherlands.
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Derivatives
The technology of using stationary MR heads was later developed by OnStream for use as a data storage media for computers. MR heads are now also commonly used in hard disks, although harddisks use the 2007 Nobel Prize winning GMR variant, whereas DCC used the earlier AMR.[3]
A derivative technology developed originally for DCC is now being used for filtering beer. Sillicon wafers with micrometer scale holes are ideal for separating yeast particles from beer. The beer flows through the silicon wafer leaving the yeast particles behind, which results in a very clear beer. The manufacturing process for the filters was originally developed for the read/write heads of DCC players.[4]
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See also
- DAT
- DVD
- Universal Media Disc (UMD)
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References
- ^ a b Newspaper article on the demise of DCC
- ^ a b Philips DCC page preserved as part of the DCC FAQ page
- ^ Magnetic Multilayers and Giant Magnetoresistance - Uwe Hartmann, R. Coehoorn et. al. Retrieved 2007-10-9.
- ^ Hi-fi failure helps to brighten beer - New Scientist Retrieved 2007-4-2.
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External links
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