FDMS-FS

Description

This is a FUSE filesystem driver for the Fostex FDMS-3 as used by the various Fostex digital multitrackers.

News

2009-12-12 - Most of the hard work is done! libfdms is out and FDMS-FS is following very shortly.

I'm currently restructuring FDMS-FS. Here's what you can eagerly await:

  • libfdms - A cross-platform library providing a simple API for access to FDMS audio and meta-data.
  • fdms-tools - Currently fdms-query and fdms-dump which provide a debugging commandline interface to FDMS meta data and audio data respectively. Also cross platform.
  • fdms-fs - A new version of the current FUSE filesystem, which uses libfdms for FDMS I/O.

The short of it is that the first two will work on pretty much any platform without any fuss (notably Windows, Linux, Mac), and the library (a dll on windows) will allow other people to write nice user-friendly interfaces to rip the audio if that's all you want.

fdms-fs will always depend on FUSE and will only work on linux (and Mac OS X with a bit of tinkering).

In theory you could write a windows filesystem driver on top of libfdms. Have fun with that.

Supported Devices

  • FD-4,FD-8
  • D2424
  • VF160

See here for a full list of devices to see if your device uses a supported disk format. Please let me know whether or not it works for you.

Detailed description

This driver presents the FDMS filesystem as a series of directories - one for each program (song) on the disk:

/mnt/p000-song1
/mnt/p001-song2
/mnt/p002-anotherone
...

Each directory contains a number of .WAV files - one for each track:

/mnt/p001-song2/track-0.wav
/mnt/p001-song2/track-1.wav
...

These .wav files can then be played/mixed/ripped to disk as you want. Request for images

I would be eternally grateful to anyone able to provide me with a full disk image from any Fostex machine using the FDMS filesystem (not necessarily version 3). Even more so if you have an image that doesn't work with this driver!

Usage

Step 1 - Image the hard disk (optional)

I suggest taking an image of the hard disk, rather than working with the original. Having said this, I see no reason why it would cause any problems, since no write operations are attempted. You can take an image like this:

dd if=/dev/hdd of=Fostex-image.dd bs=512

This WILL take some time!

Step 2 - Mount the filesystem

./fdmsfs Fostex-image.dd /mnt

If this fails, you probably have a problem with FUSE. Please check the fuse website for more help. If you are sure it's not a fuse problem, please let me know!

Step 3 - Use the .WAVs

ls /mnt

should produce a list of the available programs.

You can obviously copy the wavs somewhere else, encode them, import them into something like cubase/soundgarden or whatever. If you just want to play a song, I suggest using Audacity, which can load all the tracks for a partiular program, and play them together or mix them down.

References

This program was written by reverse engineering an image of my FD-4 harddisk. I then came across fdms3rip, and read over the author's description of the filesystem. This helped fill in a few of the missing details. For various perl-related reasons I was never able to get fdms3rip to work, but from what I can see, it is unable to handle "silence" segments in the tracks correctly.