DCC-STUDIO

DCC-studio is a very user-friendly program that lets you record and playback
audio to and from the PC's hard disk and edit it. You can record audio from a
DCC cassette or from an external input source (The DCC-175 has optical and
coaxial digital inputs and an analog input for microphones or aux). The audio
is put on hard disk in PASC format and can only be edited by the DCC-studio
program in this form.

Recorded files on the harddisk can be recorded back to DCC without limits (no
SCMS here!) after editing. The program can also make compilations: a series
of tracks on the hard disk is then combined and can be recorded to DCC
without user intervention (not even halway the cassette when direction has to
be reversed, btw the program can also restart the last track of the first
side on the start of the second side if it doesn't fit). 

The program also reads and writes tape title, track title and artist names
per track to and from DCC. It can also do this with your self-recorded
DCC-cassettes, not only the prerecorded ones, although the DCC-175 can only
show the information about prerecorded cassettes on its screen for some dark
reason. And the program does it even better than (for example) the DCC-730
recorder, with which you CAN display track titles (artist name is not
supported and tape title is only supported for prerecorded DCC's on the 730)
and program them, but only using the characters A-Z, 0-9 and +-*. Most of the
songs I record are in English so the apostrophe (') is very common, but it
cannot be recorded using the 730 - it can with DCC-studio. And Studio also
supports uppercase/lowercase and a number of other ASCII characters that can
be SHOWN by the 730 but not recorded simply because there's no way of
inputting them.

You can also edit the tracks themselves: The program will show you a waveform
in which you can cut, paste, fade and equalize fragments. You can also
program loops and put named markers in the file. The editing is
lightning-fast because the program uses so-called non-destructive editing: If
you cut out a piece of music or paste in a fragment from another track, it's
not actually cut out of the PASC file: the program keeps a separate .TRK file
that contains data about which fragments to use from which PASC files; if you
cut or paste in a track, the TRK file is updated which takes almost no time
at all.

Using this program you can even make tracks that are longer than a DCC
cassette can hold. I have a number of 1-hour long "grand mixes": mixed
compilations of dance music from a whole year (Dutch people will probably
recognize them: they're by Ben Liebrand) which I had on reel-to-reel tape. I
recorded them to DCC with a bit of overlap at the point where the tape turns
over. Then I recorded them to hard disk (I could have done all that in one
step but my tape recorder is in another room) and pasted the tracks together,
resulting in a one-hour track. I then created one audio-file for the whole
track (the program has an option for this and it can also detect unused PASC
files) and used a CD-recorder at work to record a CD-ROM with 4 of these
mixes, totalling to 4 hours of CD-quality music (technically I could have
fitted almost 5 hours on one CD-Recordable: they have a capacity of 74
minutes real-time, the DCC files have the 4:1 compression of the PASC
format). Now I can put that CD-ROM in my CD-ROM drive and use the Studio
program to play it back while I'm working on something else. There's only one
little problem: the program allows only a short time for disk seeks (except
at the start of the playback) so my 4x-speed CD-ROM drive is to slow for
scanning forward or backward: the program then gives a buffer underrun error.