FDMS-3 Ripper

FDMS-3 Ripper is a Perl program for extracting the tracks from the FDMS-3 filesystem. I recently bought a Fostex FD-8 multitrack hard disk recorder for recording music. It works great, but I was disappointed to discover that, although it uses a standard external SCSI hard disk, there was no way to "rip" the recorded tracks from the hard drive to my PC over the SCSI port. The alternatives were to use the analog-out to re-record each track using my soundcard (resulting in loss of quality and loss of synch between tracks), or buying a $500 ADAT card for my PC.

I decided that I would try to figure out a way to rip the music directly over the SCSI port. The FD-8 uses a proprietary Fostex filesystem, FDMS-3. I decided to hook it up to my PC and probed the drive. I was able to figure out the basic layout of the filesystem pretty quickly. Note: this is designed to hard disks formatted in the FDMS-3 "Mastering" mode, which stores the audio data in uncompressed format.

In order to use the program, you will need to take the hard disk that has the FDMS-3 filesystem on it and hook it up to your PC (mine is a SCSI drive -- dont know if this will work with one of the internal IDE drives you can hook up to the FD-8). Make sure that Linux can see the drive (dont try to mount it, though!). You might want to have a look at SCSI-2.4-HOWTO to get the drive recognized. My external hard disk is located at "/dev/sda", but yours could end up elsewhere.

Next, you need to make sure you have the following on your system: perl, sox and fileutils (for the "dd" utility). Security Warning Unfortunately, this program presents significant security issues, so be careful with it. The script needs to be able to access the hard disk directly, so you can either run it as root (not safe), or change the permissons for the hard disk device (in my case, "/dev/sda"). Run the program with "./fdms3rip /dev/sda" (substituting the actual location of your hard disk).

This will list all of the programs present on the hard disk. Then, run it again with the number of the program you want to fetch off the hard disk: "./fdms3rip /dev/sda 5" to get all of the recorded tracks for program number 5. After waiting a bit, you should now have a bunch of WAV files on your Linux machine. Warning This program will create and erase files with the names "dir" and "header" in the directory it is run from. It would be best to run this program from a clean directory, just to make sure there are no problems.