Methods for doing a digi-transfer can be written up on this page, which is linked to SeedingGuidelines. Volunteers?

The folks of [dankseeds] may be able to advise or assist you with the DAT transfer process. (Links to other groups like DAT-Heads?)

If you are planning to seed 24-bit archival material (perhaps in FLAC format), check out the detailed [24-bit FAQ].

General how-to on DAT transfer to PC:
From http://forums.etree.org/viewtopic.php?t=2272
Mark Goldey writes:

You need three things:

1) A digital soundcard w/ digital inputs

2) Software to record and edit the music on your PC

3) Coax or optical cable to connect your DAT to the digital soundcard on your PC.

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I need to know step by step!

This is a potentially huge subject, and we'll have to break things down into chunks, and take it one step at a time. Let's take another pass.

1) You need a DAT deck (of course), with a digital output, either optical/toslink or coax

2) You need a digital soundcard with a digital input jack to match the output on your DAT. Anything that comes standard on a PC (e.g., Soundblaster) won't do b/c it resamples the data on the fly. Good choices include M-Audio's Dio and Audiophile lines, Xefire(?) cards, and a host of others. They will set you back about $100, and you should get one that will handle bitrates and word length of up to 24/96. Most decent cards will do so.

WHAT CABLE SHOULD I USE FROM DAT TO SOUNDCARD? 7-PIN TO RCA? 7-PIN ->?

RCA cable is analog only. You need a digital cable, so either 7-pin > Coax or 7-pin > optical. It depends, of course, on what kind of inputs your soundcard has.

3) Soundcards come w/ software, usually, to capture audio data, but products like SoundForge? and CoolEdit? work better. CoolEdit? Lite costs $30 or so and is sufficient. You record the incoming audio data through the soundcard into your software.

4) Software is used to re-sample the DAT data from 16/48 to 16/44.1, which is CD audio quality. There can be a lot of debate about whether to use software or your soundcard to resample. Let's not have that debate until you have software and a soundcard.

5) You can use that software to split tracks, but often it will not split on sector boundaries, so folks use CDWave to do it, instead.

6) Rename the files if necessary, convert to SHN, create .md5s and a .txt file, and you're done. (See SeedingGuidelines and NamingStandards for tips on this step.)

See also: SeedingGuidelines, NamingStandards