Many neurophysiology labs use Plexon and TDT. They both are pretty good recording systems, but, for offline spike sorting, somehow people tend to prefer Plexon’s software. Obviously Plexon’s offline sorter does not support TTank, so there is no way to use it, if the raw data was recorded with TDT. This little software I made, TDT2PLX, converts TTank blocks to PLX files so that you can do sorting TDT data with Plexon’s offline sorter. You can also copy the new sortcodes back from PLX to TTank with SortcodeCopy, another utility included. These programs require Visual C++ Redistributable Package for Visual Studio 2013 (vcredist_x86.exe), if it is not already installed on your computer.

Download TDT2PLX_x86.zip (32-bit, 2.42MB)

Upon a TTank block being selected, TDT2PLX shows Store IDs that can be exported to PLX. Since this software is made for my own necessity, it assumes each data is the following TDT event type, which, I believe, is typical.

Spike: Snip
Eventcode: Strobe+ or Strobe-
LFP: Stream

You can also export all the blocks in the selected TTank by one click—in this case, you don’t get to choose which channel to export. The resulting PLX files are saved in the selected TTank folder (e.g., F:\TTanks\TankName in the example of the left figure), when you click [Convert]. The format version of the PLX file is 1.05 and, if your TDT preamp has 16-bit resolution, there is no information loss caused by this conversion.

Note: Plexon’s offline sorter may report a wrong waveform length, when it reads the converted PLX files. It is because I set the timestamp frequency high (1MHz) in order to preserve single-precision accuracy of TDT timestamps. This is intended and does not affect offline sorting.