Conventional C2 coding and interleaving for multi-track data tape in LTO-3/4 do not support recording data onto a number of concurrent tracks which is not a power of two. Higher-rate longer C2 codes, which do not degrade error rate performance, are provided. An adjustable format and interleaving scheme accommodates future tape drives in which the number of concurrent tracks is not necessarily a power of two. A data set is segmented into a plurality of unencoded subdata sets and parity bytes are generated for each row and column. The parameters of the C2 code include N2 as the least common multiple of the number of possible tracks to which codeword objects are to be written. COs are formed from N2 C1 codewords, mapped onto a logical data track according to information within headers of the CO and modulation encoded into synchronized COs which are written to the tape.