The Petty Tracks Mystery Solved
Added 2023-01-01 03:06:35 +0000 UTCFinally - closure. And some investigation into the proprietary Tascam hard drive system. Enjoy!
Comments
Not many.
Fran Blanche
2023-01-02 15:24:27 +0000 UTCThanks for being a concerned 'overseer' of the media and what it contains!
Leslie Deana
2023-01-02 09:34:36 +0000 UTCAs for the drive format, I would expect that it is FAT16 with a small partition at the front with a small number of files for the “firmware” and the built-in sounds. Also some metadata possibly for songs and track names. As for recording to “sectors”, those are not disk drive sectors but rather large, contiguous collections of sectors. From the docs you found it would appear there 4 such collections. One way to encode the information for them would be for the FAT16 disk partition table to record 4 partitions beyond the first partition, which is technically partition 0 (zero). The would correspond well with the four “recording sectors” numbered 1-4 as in the docs you found. I would expect the recording sectors to begin on a “cylinder” boundary with each recording sector being 1/4th the space remaining after partition 0. Another way would be for there being just one big partition after partition 0 eating the rest of the disk. The recording sectors would then me described by metadata stored on partition 0 with some fairly obvious name. my money would be on the first forrm above, though (recording sectors represented by additional partition. that way the partition table code which is necessary for booting the full image from the disk also brings on all the data needed for the recording sectors. That would make dealing with different disk drives with somewhat different capacities, or even larger disks which could support additional recording sectors, and all that could be done simply by how the drive was formatted before installation, and requiring no change to the recording application software. just name the recording sector partitions “sector 1” through “sector n” and then the recording app would be largely insulated from the disk capacity and geometry. Yes - i like approach a lot. I would be disappointed to find it much messier. not surprised, but disappointed. -mo
Mike O'Dell
2023-01-01 22:23:13 +0000 UTCInteresting! Hope you do at least export those tracks to a useful format to play with. Could be fun to jam with Tom!
Fred Patton
2023-01-01 20:13:19 +0000 UTCWell I'd certainly be interested in seeing you put the new drive in and getting it working!
David Peaker
2023-01-01 10:53:52 +0000 UTCYes, I've had problems with old Sony video equipment that could save to an ancient 16MB memory stick, but anything larger would cause the unit to not recognize the stick. Really frustrating, but, like you, I went and found old memory sticks that were 16MB or less on eBay. Hard drives are a pain too. Some PCs, even with SATA, just don't recognize the larger drives. So whenever a computer is retired, I pull the hard drive out and store it because I can use on of those adapters you demonstrated on this video if I had to. I am truly amazed at how magnetic media stays so stable for so many decades. VHS video tapes recorded in 1988 play flawlessly today. The real hassle is having to maintain "prosumer" video equipment just so a tape can be played. Inevitably, the rubber belts used in some of the mechanics dry out and break. Every hard drive I removed from a computer can still be read without errors. It's amazing to me that magnetic tape is just so durable. The old tape formats have all outlived the hardware they play on. Same with cassette tapes made in the 70s/80s. I had to buy a TASCAM cassette to CD-ROM converter, but almost all of the old tapes remained as they were. The only exception were cassettes that lost the little felt brush that normally held the tape to the head. Easy to fix. I'm glad you retained your original mixer drive since I would not count on the hardware being intelligent enough to format a blank drive for the custom way in which it records. You may have to put that back in.
Matt Wietlispach
2023-01-01 08:00:28 +0000 UTCSo, how many degrees of separation are you from Tom Petty now? 🤣
BobC
2023-01-01 03:17:48 +0000 UTC
