Audacity Forum

I'm totally new to this, so I apologize in advance for a poor grasp of concepts and terminology...

I am trying to capture audio from DAT tape using Audacity 1.2.6. My system looks like this: Sony PCM-M1 DAT player >>>> via 7-pin Sony cable >>>> 75 ohm coax>>>> S/PDIF input on M-Audio Delta 2496 sound card.

Everything looks great and Audacity seems to be recording happily until 3 mins. and 2 seconds into any recording, when the signal flatlines.

The the sound card control panel shows the same full signal coming through the card, but Audacity has stopped receiving or recording it. There are however a few tiny little periodic blips along the flatline. AND if I let it continue like this, occasionally a second or two of music will come through and then disappear again.

I have tried saving the .aup file on three different hard drives (two of them clean and fast) and the result is still the same. (Although I'm unclear what Audacity is using as a scratch disk because it will record even if I don't designate a place to save the .aup file.)

The machine is a PowerPC Dual 2.0 with 4 gigs of RAM and running OS 10.4.11

Hope someone has a nice simple fix.

Thank you,
Abner

<<<Hope someone has a nice simple fix.>>>

Somebody sneezed and there's an epidemic of this...

Two, really. Take the analog audio output of the DAT machine and plug that into the Line-In of the Mac and capture that way, or install Audacity 1.3 and use that until 1.4 comes out. Something about the last couple of Mac-OS upgrades drives Audacity and USB audio services nuts, but only after 3 minutes, 11 minutes, 6 minutes , or 3 minutes and 2 seconds.

The analog services of both machines work far better than you think. I think you'd be surprised at the number of DAT sessions that were transferred that way. DAT machines were made purposely difficult to use by our friends in the audio industry.

Koz

Thank you, Koz.

I will give Audacity 1.3 a run, and if that doesn't work I will try going analog.

Abner