Opening Obscure Audio Transcription Files

Working with 3.5 floppies from the late 1980s I have come across some strange file formats that I am having trouble making sense of. These include, .ATP .DSP and .QT2 file extensions. If I open them in a text editor I can read a good bit of text. Based on reading this text, the file names, and the contextual information written on the disks I am relatively confident that these are transcripts created by some kind of dictation software. I'm happy that I can read some of the text in the files, but I would like to be able to really work with them.

I goggled around a bit but couldn't find any good leads for what particular application made these files and if there are any current programs that can open them? If not, I would be interested in any suggestions folks have for how to go about working with these files beyond opening them in a text editor and reading the parts that come through as text.

Trevor Owens

• file-formats
• archival-material
• born-digital
• 1980s

Comments

• Dmitry Brant: Can you ask the original owner of the floppies whether they remember what software they might have used?
• Trevor Owens: Nope. They are a small part of a large collection and were likely created by a hired staff person.
• luser droog: Are the files private? Can you show a hex-dump of a small portion?
• wizzard0: Can you provide samples of these files?
• Trevor Owens: @wizzard0 not at this point. But I will look into seeing if I can.
• Paul Wheatley: If you can share them as CC0, this is a good location to share unusual formats and/or broken files, get input from DP folks and help build a resource for DP tool developers and testers.

Answer by Christian Pietsch

I have not seen these file extensions before. On the other hand, there are other ways to find out what a file contains. Unixoid systems such as Linux and Mac OS X come with a little tool called file which can probe the first bytes of any file and then make an educated guess about the format it contains. To do that, it uses a database of characteristic patterns which is usually located in /usr/share/misc/magic. The magic database on my computer contains 11,543 non-comment lines, so I guess it can detect more than 10,000 file formats. There is a good chance it will be able to identify your file formats.

The Java world offers several more format identification tools: JHOVE2 is a framework for “format-aware characterization of digital objects”, Tika calls itself a “content analysis toolkit”, and a slightly dated alternative is called DROID for “Digital Record and Object Identification”.

All of these tools are free and open-source software.

Comments

Answer by woliveirajr

.ATP is (or might be) the Sony mini-disc ATRAC format. take a look here and here

.DSP seems to be audio-related, too.

.QT2 , according to this site, is a file associated with some document viewer, but I couldn't open the original publisher...

Comments

• Trevor Owens: This is interesting. What is really strange is that these files are all really tiny (30k->60k) and they are mostly made up of text. Would that make sense with the audio formats?
• woliveirajr: Yes, my answer is just based on the file extensions and some research... to really help, would need access to one (or more) files, or you can try what Christian Pietsch told...