There are on the market a few DAT streamers with audio capabilities. These devices are capable of reading and writing tapes from DAT recorders. As far as I know, these devices were all offered by SGI for their workstations.
Appropriate software for audio operation is however very rare and even more rare available free and in sourcecode. In my research I finally found what I was looking for with Andrew Taylor and his program read_dat (see collection of links). However, a big problem under MacOS X is the lack of support for tape drive assemblies, so that a supplemental user-client driver is necessary.
ReadDAT X contains the user-client driver as well as a graphical front end. The program is based on one of the IOKit demo programs from Apple and was overhauled accordingly to work with read_dat.
Because of the variety of licensing restrictions, read_dat was not integrated into ReadDAT X. read_dat is under GPL, and for that reason the sourcecode is included in the archive. With Apple software, the situation is not entirely clear, since the sources explicitly state that the Disk Arbitration Framework mentioned below and the headers belonging to it are not available to the public yet. For that reason, ReadDAT X is only available as a binary file.
ReadDAT X requires, in order for it to work properly, read_dat. Copy this (a compiled version for MacOS X is in the archives) into the directory /usr/bin (in the shell by means of sudo, since normal applications do not have write access to the /usr/bin directory). Then start ReadDAT X.
In the main window, all of the streamers found by the system are listed. Please note: ReadDAT X and read_dat do not check if the device has audio capabilities! The software will not work with a conventional streamer. In the next window you can test if the device is being addressed properly. With Test/ReadBlock (select, then execute with the Execute button) you will read a single block. This function only dumps the bytes containing main and sub IDs to the log window. With that, a first test is possible. Rewind, Eject and Clear Log as well as the other test functions should be self explanatory.
The slider Log Verbosity controls how much information read_dat will dump.
Probably the most important button is Read.... With this choice, a file selection box is opened, in which the directory for the audio files and the log files is selected; and in addition you need to enter a name prefix for the log and audio files. After exiting the file selection box, the actual read process starts up and only stops when it reaches a marker for the end of the tape.
Further information on audio-capable DAT streamers and available software can be found in the link collection to the left.
ReadDAT X Archive: