Program changes, index changes, seeks, and reads will reset this value. The comments in the right hand column will not appear, and are included here only to help clarify each instruction. However, the timecode format allows only integral values of frame numbers. Therefore the number of frames per second as seen in the timecode will vary, even though the actual audio frame rate is constant. If you specify an invalid timecode, dodat will attempt to convert to a valid timecode equivalent.
Absolute time is the time elapsed since the beginning of the first valid program on the tape.
Program time is the time elapsed since the first non-zero index within a program. There are other types of timecode, but since dodat does not support them, we do not describe them here. DAT scripts by Doug Cook example1.dat writes a DAT from three files, making separate programs, with proper inter-track spacing. Do NOT use this comment symbol in your commands or command scripts. They are left here for didactic purposes.