Technical Information about DCC (Digital Compact Cassette)
This software was included with, and distributed to owners of the DCC-175 recorder. Koninklijke Philips N.V. owns the rights to this software, but we post it under the Fair Use considerations of the United States Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).
Fair Use depends on the following Four Factors:
The software is reproduced for archival purpose, to make it available to those who may have lost the original media (floppy disks) or the devices to read the original media (floppy drives).
The copyrighted work is an old piece of software that’s no longer maintained (sometimes referred to as “abandonware”), that only works with the DCC-175 recorder and the PC-link cable which had to be purchased from Philips, and was included with that hardware. Without that hardware, the software is useless, and those who have the hardware already have a license to use the software.
The entire software is reproduced, because a partial reproduction would be useless to the potential audience (i.e. those who have lost their floppy disks or are unable to read them)
The DCC format was discontinued in 1997, and the software has no perceptible usefulness other than nostalgia and archival, and no value on any market worldwide.
The DCC-Studio software can be used on Windows 3.1, Windows 95 or Windows 98 to control the DCC-175 and edit music. The user interface is in English but documentation is in Dutch, because the DCC-175 and the PC-Link cable were only released in the Netherlands.
There were 3 versions; the first versions were released right around the time when Windows 95 came out, and they should only be used with Windows 3.1. The final version (1.2) is quite stable under Windows 95 as well as Windows 98 (though DCC Database is not). It cannot be used with Windows 2000 or newer.
Many thanks to Jonathan Dupré for making the earlier versions available.
For the floppy images, you can use a program such as WinImage.
This program made it possible to use the DCC-175 to make a backup of your computer running Windows 3.1, Windows 95 or Windows 98. Unfortunately it only supported short file names (long file names were introduced in Windows 95, which was released around the same time as the DCC-175 and this software). Also, at 384 kilobits per second and about 500MB capacity per tape, this feature was not very useful. Customers who could afford the DCC-175 with PC-cable for more than 900 Dutch Guilders in 1995 could probably also afford a QIC tape drive with more capacity, higher speed and better software.
The Windows version was included with the PC-cable, and updates, as well as a DOS version of the program, were made available to registered owners via BBS. Documentation is in Dutch, because the DCC-175 and PC-link cable were only released in the Netherlands.
Many thanks to Jonathan Dupré for making some of these available.
For the floppy images, you can use a program such as WinImage.
This is a program that works under Windows 3.1, Windows 95 and Windows 98 and can be used to convert DCC-Studio files to WAV files and convert WAV files to DCC too. I (Jac) seem to remember that there were two separate DOS programs DCC2WAV and WAV2DCC but I may have remembered it wrong, or maybe Philips combined the functionality into a new single program for Windows and the DOS software was discontinued.
Philips mailed this (on a floppy disk) to registered users of the DCC-Studio software in the Netherlands in 1996. Thanks to Ralf Porankiewicz at the DCC Museum for providing this.