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Topic: A few ideas and questions about audio mediums that have been bugging me. (Read 8350 times) previous topic - next topic
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A few ideas and questions about audio mediums that have been bugging me.

I'm sorry that I'm making a topic about 3 separate questions but I don't think they deserve separate topics for each.
So I've been having some ideas that come together with some questions.

1. What kind of technical advantages did they apply to DCC format (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Compact_Cassette) that made it possible to carry digital audio into a tape that a regular tape as a physical format (TYPE II or III let's say) can't do? I mean if you would use the same type of modulation and recording speed wouldn't you be able to store digital audio on a regular tape? I'm really trying to find a way to store digital audio on a tape as a project but the modulation methods available and the software available for storing digital data on tapes is not enough to achieve the robustness and the bitrate required for such project. Also I wasn't able to find enough documentation on the format which makes such project even harder)

2. How come there was never a competitor to redbook CDs that actually uses somekind of lossless compression (let's say like DVD-A can use Meridial Lossless). I do get that it would mean that they wouldn't be backwards/redbook compatible but it's not like other competing formats were. There would be so many advantages, especially compared to rival formats, like:
*The actual hardware part of the reader is the cheapest one out of all the competitors and it's going to be present either way on the device that reads the actual disc.
*The medium is also the cheapest one compared to SACD discs and DVDs
*Compressing the audio data would open the gate to compete directly with SACDs by offering higher sampling rates, higher bit depths or even longer playtimes.
*Longer playtimes would eliminate the extra costs for more pressings with multiple discs that might not be needed.
*Ability to include more metadata.
*Ability to introduce somekind of strong(er than redbook technology) copy protection on the disc.
 

Re: A few ideas and questions about audio mediums that have been bugging me.

Reply #1 –
Quote from: Klimis on
What kind of technical advantages did they apply to DCC format (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Compact_Cassette) that made it possible to carry digital audio into a tape that a regular tape as a physical format (TYPE II or III let's say) can't do?

Wiki says it just writes more tracks in parallel, so it'd have more data per length. 

Quote from: Klimis on
I mean if you would use the same type of modulation and recording speed wouldn't you be able to store digital audio on a regular tape? I'm really trying to find a way to store digital audio on a tape as a project but the modulation methods available and the software available for storing digital data on tapes is not enough to achieve the robustness and the bitrate required for such project. Also I wasn't able to find enough documentation on the format which makes such project even harder)

Yes you can.  This was super common back in the 1980s.  It is less common now though due to the relatively low datarate.  In the old days capacity was super low (less than 1 KB/s).  I bet with modern processing power you can do better.  Wikipedia says 17 KB/s for modern software, although I bet a good head is required to do that.

Quote from: Klimis on
2. How come there was never a competitor to redbook CDs that actually uses somekind of lossless compression (let's say like DVD-A can use Meridial Lossless).

By the time the hardware was available to do something like that cost-effectively, CDs were so completely entrenched that there was no room for an alternative format. 

Re: A few ideas and questions about audio mediums that have been bugging me.

Reply #3 –
Quote from: saratoga on
Wiki says it just writes more tracks in parallel, so it'd have more data per length.
Now that's what I don't get. While it has 9 tracks, 8 are for audio (4 for each side and one for auxiliary/data) which resulted in a datarate of ~384Kbps.
Analog cassete tapes have 4 tracks, 2 for each side. If we treat the cassette as a one side only (like how old-school 4 track cassete recorders worked (see Tascam MF-P01) we are hundreds of Kbps away from achieving such data rate. Now even with 2 tracks for each side with half the datarate (192Kbps) even then we are really far from achieving such datarate. What is the reason behind such issue? What was the magic into these DCC tapes that made them possible to achieve such datarate?

Quote from: Apesbrain on
http://audiophilereview.com/cd-dac-digital/in-praise-of-the-sony-pcm-f1.html

I remember reading about this after stumbling accross DVHS:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D-VHS
Fancy stuff!

Re: A few ideas and questions about audio mediums that have been bugging me.

Reply #4 –
Quote from: Klimis on
1. What kind of technical advantages did they apply to DCC format (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Compact_Cassette) that made it possible to carry digital audio into a tape that a regular tape as a physical format (TYPE II or III let's say) can't do? I mean if you would use the same type of modulation and recording speed wouldn't you be able to store digital audio on a regular tape? I'm really trying to find a way to store digital audio on a tape as a project but the modulation methods available and the software available for storing digital data on tapes is not enough to achieve the robustness and the bitrate required for such project. Also I wasn't able to find enough documentation on the format which makes such project even harder)
First of all, the DCC uses 9 tracks per side, as opposed to 2 tracks on analog tape (1 of 9 tracks is an auxiliary track, so the audio actually uses 8 tracks). To compensate for this, you would have to run the tape at 4 times the speed.

The crucial parameter for the achievable bitrate is the bandwidth of the medium. If you would record the bits as is, you would need a bandwidth from zero up to half the bit rate. If you use some kind of modulation, it is the properties of the modulation that determines the bandwidth. A tape doesn't have a bandwidth down to zero, so using a modulation is unavoidable. DCC uses an 8/10 modulation that makes 10 bits out of 8 bits. I don't know the exact code used, but it is certainly chosen to minimize bandwidth requirements, by consisting of runs of more than 1 consecutive 0-bit or 1-bit. For example, the code would avoid single 0-bits surrounded by 1-bits, or vice versa.

A total data rate of 384 kbits/s divides down to 48000 bits/s per head. In addition to 8/10 modulation, there's further data added for error correction. So we end up with 72000 bits/s per head. If the encoding ensures run lengths of at least 2, the raw bandwidth demand would be around 72000 bits/s divided by 4, or 18000 bits/s, which is achievable with good tape, given that the head gaps are going to be very small. In practice the necessary bandwidth will be somewhat wider, but I'm concerned with ballpark figures here. So this rough estimate would indicate that it can work.

If you want to duplicate this with an ordinary analog tape recorder, speeding up the tape 4-fold would be unlikely to suffice. Even if you used the encoding in DCC in an analogous form, you'd still find that you would need tape heads with finer gaps, and align them more accurately.

Quote
2. How come there was never a competitor to redbook CDs that actually uses somekind of lossless compression (let's say like DVD-A can use Meridial Lossless). I do get that it would mean that they wouldn't be backwards/redbook compatible but it's not like other competing formats were. There would be so many advantages, especially compared to rival formats, like:
*The actual hardware part of the reader is the cheapest one out of all the competitors and it's going to be present either way on the device that reads the actual disc.
*The medium is also the cheapest one compared to SACD discs and DVDs
*Compressing the audio data would open the gate to compete directly with SACDs by offering higher sampling rates, higher bit depths or even longer playtimes.
*Longer playtimes would eliminate the extra costs for more pressings with multiple discs that might not be needed.
*Ability to include more metadata.
*Ability to introduce somekind of strong(er than redbook technology) copy protection on the disc.
Copy protection helped to kill the other formats, too. I don't think your proposed variant would have escaped this fate.

I don't think your list of features contains anything compelling enough to overcome people's hesitation to embrace yet another format. Multiple competing formats is bad for the consumer market. We have seen this over and over again. The long-time success of the CD shows that its feature set was pretty well defined and adequate even after decades. Kudos to the foresight of the inventors.

What's the third question?

Re: A few ideas and questions about audio mediums that have been bugging me.

Reply #5 –
About the capacity of the old tape there where datalogers in the late 80s that where capable of storing about 60MB in a standard 90' tape, or around 90Kbps, today using more advanced modulation techniques in a stereo tape is possible to double this to near 120MB 90' tape (190Kbps) using a quality deck, but going fancy building a deck where the head and is drivers are special designed to be connected to the DACs/ADCs and some precision control motors this can be pushed to 160MB 90' tape (248Kbps). This last option is similar to the approach of the DCC, after all more than magic the secret was math and enginering.

Re: A few ideas and questions about audio mediums that have been bugging me.

Reply #6 –
Quote from: saratoga on
Quote from: Klimis on
2. How come there was never a competitor to redbook CDs that actually uses somekind of lossless compression (let's say like DVD-A can use Meridial Lossless).

By the time the hardware was available to do something like that cost-effectively, CDs were so completely entrenched that there was no room for an alternative format. 


I am not so sure of that. About when could Shorten be decoded in real-time? One could very well have dumped audio files to a data CD-ROM.
But I cannot imagine industry support - rather, one would have to expect major costs fighting the RIAA back then when they tried to restrict audio-on-CD-R to very special hardware and media.

That said, there were audio formats on physical Red Book CDDAs: DSD-CD and DTS-CD (both lossy, but the latter at least had something to offer in multichannel). And there was even sort-of one lossless format: HDCD. As good as backwards compatible (at some dynamic compression), as good as lossless (remember that dithering down to 16 bits is not a lossless operation in any case), gained at least some momentum - and then disappeared.



Quote from: Klimis on
There would be so many advantages, especially compared to rival formats, like:
*The actual hardware part of the reader is the cheapest one out of all the competitors and it's going to be present either way on the device that reads the actual disc.
*The medium is also the cheapest one compared to SACD discs and DVDs
*Compressing the audio data would open the gate to compete directly with SACDs by offering higher sampling rates, higher bit depths or even longer playtimes.
*Longer playtimes would eliminate the extra costs for more pressings with multiple discs that might not be needed.
*Ability to include more metadata.
*Ability to introduce somekind of strong(er than redbook technology) copy protection on the disc.

* Sure, CD drives were once much cheaper than DVD drives. But then the industry started to push the DVD format.  Both players and discs (rewritables in a format war, and ...)
* I can hardly imagine that the price difference between pressed DVD and pressed CD matters anything nowadays.  Not even sure what is the cheapest. But one actually tried what you suggest for video formats, which were then killed by the DVD.
* The SACD is expensive because it is a niche product, not because it is technically extremely complex. And it is a niche product because there was not - at the time - demand for hi-rez. (Maybe now there is.) And certainly not copy-protected.
* Longer playtimes? The industry seems not to want that. I don't think they want to sell you a DVD with ten CDs on.
* Metadata? CD-Text! And if one had wanted more, it could have been implemented in CD-Extra and a specification of a metadata text file format. So there was evidently not enough demand for it within a format that did sell - and even less for a format that did not exist.
* Copy protection? They did just that! Introduced non-CDDA-compliant hacks to physical CDs, pissing on and off their paying customers by ruining error correction - and then gave it up because it offered no real value added. And at the same time, they tried to push formats with even stronger copy protection, and arguably that is another reason why the DVD-based formats failed.

Re: A few ideas and questions about audio mediums that have been bugging me.

Reply #7 –
Quote from: Phanton_13 on
About the capacity of the old tape there where datalogers in the late 80s that where capable of storing about 60MB in a standard 90' tape, or around 90Kbps, today using more advanced modulation techniques in a stereo tape is possible to double this to near 120MB 90' tape (190Kbps) using a quality deck, but going fancy building a deck where the head and is drivers are special designed to be connected to the DACs/ADCs and some precision control motors this can be pushed to 160MB 90' tape (248Kbps). This last option is similar to the approach of the DCC, after all more than magic the secret was math and enginering.
Any link to any tools and documentation for such thing? In theory alot can be possible but I haven't been able to find solid proof for such thing, like some kind of command line app that modulates the audio.

Re: A few ideas and questions about audio mediums that have been bugging me.

Reply #8 –
Quote from: Klimis on
I'm sorry that I'm making a topic about 3 separate questions but I don't think they deserve separate topics for each.
So I've been having some ideas that come together with some questions.

1. What kind of technical advantages did they apply to DCC format (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Compact_Cassette) that made it possible to carry digital audio into a tape that a regular tape as a physical format (TYPE II or III let's say) can't do? I mean if you would use the same type of modulation and recording speed wouldn't you be able to store digital audio on a regular tape? I'm really trying to find a way to store digital audio on a tape as a project but the modulation methods available and the software available for storing digital data on tapes is not enough to achieve the robustness and the bitrate required for such project. Also I wasn't able to find enough documentation on the format which makes such project even harder)

DCC implemented an early kind of lossy or perceptually-based encoding.  As computational power per dollar increased, and more was discovered about the natural insensitivity of the human ear to certain sounds in certain circumstances, it was possible to have better sound quality using less space on the media. Of course, media density and flexibility also improved vastly.

If you haven't noticed, flash memory is eating optical media's lunch and doubling its already good price/performance every few years.

If you can't find what you need along these lines of data compression and media data density in current technology, maybe its time to revisit your requirements.   It is highly unlikely that a student is going to meaningfully improve these areas.

Quote
2. How come there was never a competitor to redbook CDs that actually uses somekind of lossless compression (let's say like DVD-A can use Meridian Lossless). I do get that it would mean that they wouldn't be backwards/redbook compatible but it's not like other competing formats were. There would be so many advantages, especially compared to rival formats, like:
*The actual hardware part of the reader is the cheapest one out of all the competitors and it's going to be present either way on the device that reads the actual disc.

There are all kinds of competing technologies in this area, and many of them are very good. A lot of them are about as free as free can be.  However, this market naturally became very fragmented. The number of potential competitors is vast and the market has not decided on just one or even just a few.

Quote
*The medium is also the cheapest one compared to SACD discs and DVDs

I don't see any evidence that it costs appreciably more to make DVDs than CDs. The economies of scale favor whatever sells the fastest. It appears that all optical media, pressed or recordable is a declining market. Real-time downloads and flash memory are ascending or at least holding their own. It is a buyer's market.

Quote
*Compressing the audio data would open the gate to compete directly with SACDs by offering higher sampling rates, higher bit depths or even longer playtimes.

SACD and DVD-A were solutions looking for a problem. There is no known audio sound quality problem with the Redbook CD other than perhaps lack of discrete channels. OTOH stereo seems to have a heck of a lot of life in it, still.  Proving that a sound quality problem exists should be very easy as the tools for doing so are readily available and again about as free as free gets, but nobody seems to be able to do it. Of course there is tons of anecdotal opinion otherwise, but can we all say "Placebo"? ;-)

Quote
*Longer playtimes would eliminate the extra costs for more pressings with multiple discs that might not be needed.

Irrelevant. If you look at where the market is going, namely downloads and streaming, there is no bankable demand for media with longer play times.  Downloads and streaming are selling partially based on the fact that they distribute music in other ways than long playing prepackaged media. I don't see any market for longer playtimes at all.

Quote
*Ability to include more metadata.

Ditto.

Quote
*Ability to introduce some kind of strong(er than redbook technology) copy protection on the disc.

Ditto. Copy protection has always been a red herring because all known forms of copy protection are fairly trivial to  circumvent.

Forcing the digital music back into the analog domain is about as far as one can practically go with copy protection, and hardware and software that effectively circumvents that issue is readily available, has lots of trained users, and is highly effective.

Re: A few ideas and questions about audio mediums that have been bugging me.

Reply #9 –
Quote from: Apesbrain on
Quote
Wikipedia says 17 KB/s for modern software, although I bet a good head is required to do that.
In the late '80s one could record digital CD quality on VCR tape.

http://audiophilereview.com/cd-dac-digital/in-praise-of-the-sony-pcm-f1.html

You're about 10 years late. The PCM-F1 was introduced in 1977 according to this source. PCM_adaptor Wikipedia article

I recall being blown away by bootleg PCM adapter - VCR digital tapes in the late 1970s.  I think it was a PCM-F1/Betamax combo. Both were relatively rare and pricey in those days, but some of the right people had them. I had never been so impressed since the first time I heard 1/2 track 15 ips studio masters, only more so.

Of course this gives the lie to claims that early digital converters were bad sounding. Their actual most serious problem was that they represented a highly  disruptive technology. I can't believe how long newbies have been continuing to swallow the same old lies about analog being audibly superior.

Re: A few ideas and questions about audio mediums that have been bugging me.

Reply #10 –
Quote from: Arnold B. Krueger on
DCC implemented an early kind of lossy or perceptually-based encoding.  As computational power per dollar increased, and more was discovered about the natural insensitivity of the human ear to certain sounds in certain circumstances, it was possible to have better sound quality using less space on the media. Of course, media density and flexibility also improved vastly.

If you haven't noticed, flash memory is eating optical media's lunch and doubling its already good price/performance every few years.

If you can't find what you need along these lines of data compression and media data density in current technology, maybe its time to revisit your requirements.  It is highly unlikely that a student is going to meaningfully improve these areas

This does not answer my question. My question was mostly asking how was the data modulated on the actual tape since technically a DCC tape does not differ to a Cassette tape as much as they differ to DAT and VHS tapes. The whole key was the modulation/demodulation process which I can't seem to be able to replicate. I doubt that a DCC tape as a media allowed for higher bandwith storage, it should be ideantical to a cassette tape.

Quote from: Arnold B. Krueger on
Irrelevant. If you look at where the market is going, namely downloads and streaming, there is no bankable demand for media with longer play times.  Downloads and streaming are selling partially based on the fact that they distribute music in other ways than long playing prepackaged media. I don't see any market for longer playtimes at all.
You are talking about today standars when I am talking about standars of over a decade ago where record labels would go as far as cutting parts of a track or a remix shorter to fit the maximum length of a Redbook disc. I have Remix compilations that go even a step further and use overburning with longer than allowed playtimes which the playback cuts on the last track mostly on older equipment that don't seem to cope well with such thing. One of the discs funilly enough is a Sterlingsound reference disc that was sent to radio stations containing the instrumentals of an Album track containing the B-Sides too.

Re: A few ideas and questions about audio mediums that have been bugging me.

Reply #11 –
By a decade ago, it was probably too late introducing a new format based on physical CDs.  (DVDs were already cheap to press, but the DVD-based audio-only formats were dying.)
That some did make CDs with excerpts or "overburning" does not mean there would be room for another format - a new format is much more expensive than a double CD.

You need to go back some twenty years. To the time when all the big hardware players had agreed on a joint move to push DVD, not willing to risk a VHS/Betamax format war. They already had too many video hacks for CD, and they were going to replace those by one new format. However, they failed at replacing the CD for audio. But the RIAA did in part succeed in restricting audio-playable CD-ROMs. So there went the "natural" CD-based competition.

Re: A few ideas and questions about audio mediums that have been bugging me.

Reply #12 –
Quote from: Porcus on
Quote from: saratoga on
Quote from: Klimis on
2. How come there was never a competitor to redbook CDs that actually uses somekind of lossless compression (let's say like DVD-A can use Meridial Lossless).

By the time the hardware was available to do something like that cost-effectively, CDs were so completely entrenched that there was no room for an alternative format. 


I am not so sure of that. About when could Shorten be decoded in real-time? One could very well have dumped audio files to a data CD-ROM.

It is not about when it could be decoded in real-time, it is about when you could do so without having to commit enormous engineering costs to build the first unit.  That would be roughly 2000, when mass produced programmable audio hardware became reasonably well available at a price you could afford without selling tens of millions per year.  After then you could just buy the hardware, write the decoder, and then assemble a product without having to customize or even design your own chips.

Prior to that you could certainly have designed some kind of stripped down SHN decoder around a TI DSP core, and then paid someone to fab it for you, but the upfront costs would have been immense, and all to stretch a CD out from 80 minutes to perhaps 100 minutes.  There were much cheaper ways to do that back in those days, which is what everyone did instead. 

Quote from: Porcus on
But I cannot imagine industry support - rather, one would have to expect major costs fighting the RIAA back then when they tried to restrict audio-on-CD-R to very special hardware and media.

I imagine if you'd pitched that to Sony in 1996, they'd have pointed out that they could easily expand the capacity of a CD by more than 30% just by increasing the NA of the read out optics without having to spend a small fortune on semiconductors.  Remember, by the late 1990s things like GD-ROM were already commercially available with larger capacity and almost no cost premium:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GD-ROM

You'd probably have had better luck ten years earlier than that, but the chips would have been even more expensive in the 1980s. 

Quote from: Klimis on
This does not answer my question. My question was mostly asking how was the data modulated on the actual tape since technically a DCC tape does not differ to a Cassette tape as much as they differ to DAT and VHS tapes. The whole key was the modulation/demodulation process which I can't seem to be able to replicate. I doubt that a DCC tape as a media allowed for higher bandwith storage, it should be ideantical to a cassette tape.

I have no idea what the modulation used was, but this is contradicted by the wiki article you linked, which claims they used both a different type of recording head and a different type of tape than ordinary audio cassettes.  My guess is that the tape and head they choose encoded more data per unit area. 

Re: A few ideas and questions about audio mediums that have been bugging me.

Reply #13 –
Quote from: Klimis on
Quote from: Arnold B. Krueger on
DCC implemented an early kind of lossy or perceptually-based encoding.  As computational power per dollar increased, and more was discovered about the natural insensitivity of the human ear to certain sounds in certain circumstances, it was possible to have better sound quality using less space on the media. Of course, media density and flexibility also improved vastly.

If you haven't noticed, flash memory is eating optical media's lunch and doubling its already good price/performance every few years.

If you can't find what you need along these lines of data compression and media data density in current technology, maybe its time to revisit your requirements.  It is highly unlikely that a student is going to meaningfully improve these areas

This does not answer my question.

That's because you didn't ask the right question the first time. The second time, you did a little better.

Quote
My question was mostly asking how was the data modulated on the actual tape since technically a DCC tape does not differ to a Cassette tape as much as they differ to DAT and VHS tapes. The whole key was the modulation/demodulation process which I can't seem to be able to replicate. I doubt that a DCC tape as a media allowed for higher bandwith storage, it should be ideantical to a cassette tape.

The DCC tape was recorded using similar technology as was used in mainframe and minicomputer data tapes of 10-20 years earlier, which I am familiar with because I used to work for IBM on those things.  Its been a long time since I worked with this technology, and my memory was refreshed by the relevant Wikipedia article which it seems you never bothered to study.

Wikipedia.org Digital Compact Cassette

(1) The tape was recorded with signals that represented 1's, and 0's, not analog signals that varied. This was enhanced by using a similar tape formulation as was used on computer data tapes.

(2) Magnetorestitive tape heads were able to achieve much high longitudinal recording densities.  There were 9 parallel tracks on the tape, 8 for digital audio data and 1 for auxiliary information.  This differed from computer tapes that used the 9th track for parity. I suspect that at this late date a dedicated parity track had been superseded by a more sophisticated recording technique for the 8 data tracks, possibly related to CD Audio technology which had been in use for about a decade by then (1992).


Quote from: Arnold B. Krueger on
Irrelevant. If you look at where the market is going, namely downloads and streaming, there is no bankable demand for media with longer play times.  Downloads and streaming are selling partially based on the fact that they distribute music in other ways than long playing prepackaged media. I don't see any market for longer playtimes at all.

Quote
You are talking about today standards when I am talking about standards of over a decade ago where record labels would go as far as cutting parts of a track or a remix shorter to fit the maximum length of a Redbook disc.

I am unaware of that happening. If shorter versions of tracks were made, they were typically made for reasons of air time.

I've never ever seen a first release pop CD that came close to filling a whole side of a CD. Maybe some "Greatest Hits" compendiums did that, but I have a large number of those, and they typically don't come close to running 70 or 80 minutes.

The preferences of consumers today are IME not that much different from the way they have been all along. If they could get just the track they wanted, they would have.  I have a few CDs with just a couple of standard length tracks that came nowhere near using the available space.

IME as soon as MP3s became available, they were distributed as single tracks.

Quote
I have Remix compilations that go even a step further and use overburning with longer than allowed playtimes which the playback cuts on the last track mostly on older equipment that don't seem to cope well with such thing. One of the discs funilly enough is a Sterlingsound reference disc that was sent to radio stations containing the instrumentals of an Album track containing the B-Sides too.

I understand that Sterling Sound has mastered over 27,000 CDs. If they approached or stretched some limits with a a few albums, so what?  I am unaware of enough of a demand for longer CDs to justify any extensions to the format. Proof of that is the fact that it never happened.  Proof of the fact of the adequacy of the existing format is the fact that so few commerical CDs even came close to fully exploiting the space that was there.  I think I've seen some cases where an album was spread over 2 discs where the music could have fit on 1. This was apparently done to create perceived value.

Re: A few ideas and questions about audio mediums that have been bugging me.

Reply #14 –
Quote from: Klimis on
Any link to any tools and documentation for such thing? In theory alot can be possible but I haven't been able to find solid proof for such thing, like some kind of command line app that modulates the audio.

The documentation is rare, and the software nonexistent as all the software is tailored to compatibility with old formats or based on it.

This paper describes a technique that clearly have much similarity with the one used in DCC:
http://sci-hub.cc/10.1049/jiere.1987.0075

One paper about DCC:
http://sci-hub.cc/10.1109/5.326405

This paper is interesting and relates to posterior developments and more in your line.
http://sci-hub.cc/10.1109/TCE.1985.289904

We also have the streamer cassette that hold up to 160MB but the information is very scarce.
http://www.obsoletemedia.org/streamer-cassette/

And for software I don't know any but you can try to use DRM software to do a proof of concept, DRM as in Digital Radion Mondiale. Although is more tailored to radio transmission it can work quite well in tape as the radio medium is more noisy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Radio_Mondiale
https://sourceforge.net/projects/drm/?source=directory
http://nt.eit.uni-kl.de/static/diorama/index.html
https://github.com/kit-cel/gr-drm

Re: A few ideas and questions about audio mediums that have been bugging me.

Reply #15 –
Actually ... I did not even know about this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hi-MD had a capacity for 94 minutes PCM. Brought to you by the creators of Betamax ...

Quote from: saratoga on
Quote from: Porcus on
But I cannot imagine industry support - rather, one would have to expect major costs fighting the RIAA back then when they tried to restrict audio-on-CD-R to very special hardware and media.

I imagine if you'd pitched that to Sony in 1996, they'd have pointed out that they could easily expand the capacity of a CD by more than 30% just by increasing the NA of the read out optics without having to spend a small fortune on semiconductors.  Remember, by the late 1990s things like GD-ROM were already commercially available with larger capacity and almost no cost premium:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GD-ROM

"considered a mistake that contributed to the Dreamcast's early demise."

Yeah ... so even in the game console world, where the drives are bundled with the machine (unlike for music) and the vendor ensures that this is how the content is delivered (unlike for music), this choice of format could ruin your business.

Re: A few ideas and questions about audio mediums that have been bugging me.

Reply #16 –
Thanx @Phanton_13 I find your post really exciting! I will give a good read at your links!

Re: A few ideas and questions about audio mediums that have been bugging me.

Reply #17 –
Quote from: Porcus on
Actually ... I did not even know about this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hi-MD had a capacity for 94 minutes PCM. Brought to you by the creators of Betamax ...

Quote from: saratoga on
Quote from: Porcus on
But I cannot imagine industry support - rather, one would have to expect major costs fighting the RIAA back then when they tried to restrict audio-on-CD-R to very special hardware and media.

I imagine if you'd pitched that to Sony in 1996, they'd have pointed out that they could easily expand the capacity of a CD by more than 30% just by increasing the NA of the read out optics without having to spend a small fortune on semiconductors.  Remember, by the late 1990s things like GD-ROM were already commercially available with larger capacity and almost no cost premium:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GD-ROM

"considered a mistake that contributed to the Dreamcast's early demise."

Yeah ... so even in the game console world, where the drives are bundled with the machine (unlike for music) and the vendor ensures that this is how the content is delivered (unlike for music), this choice of format could ruin your business.



Timing played a role as well.  As the Nintendo GameCube could not play DVDs either.  Being the first out in a console generation and yet not utilizing the DVD format was stupid of SEGA.  It allowed Sony to gain an edge.

I think if SEGA skipped the 32X, supported the Saturn better it would've turned out better for them.

The PS3 wasn't exactly 1st place in it's generation despite being the only console to play Blurays.

Also consumer confusion can affect a business.  Nintendo was very successful with the Wii but when they went to release a new console they called it the "Wii U".

And finally the overall quality and value of a product and who it's marketed towards can determine it's success and adoption.  With a format you want as many people to adopt it as possible.  With a game console the quality of the software library and the consumer base that adopts it can affect you, not just in the present tense but also later on.