Encoding Data for Audio Tape?

Kris_J asks: "I've recently purchased and installed an audio cassette deck for my PC. It makes recording to and from tape particularly painless, but I'm looking for some funky other stuff to try. Along the lines of my new old SuperDisk FD32MB that can store 32MB on a normal 1.44MB floppy, and my Cuttle Cart that can load Atari 2600 games from encoded audio I'm wondering if there's any program that can encode a file as audio that can survive being recorded to audio tape or compressed as an MP3. I'll worry about 'why' later."

tape yes, mp3 no

[n9hmg]

MP3 is a lossy compression. If lossy recovery is OK with you, fine. For storage to tape - maybe cwpcm the file after uuencoding it. I can't remember if there's a morse code character for each character used by uuencode.
on a more practical line - send it as straight ascii, using the ham radio interfaces in Linux, through the sound card. decode that with the same interfaces and you're done. Those tools are used to loss, but I'd expect 100% copy on and off tape.

This looks like a pretty cool product.

[mellon]

Where did you get it? It looks like it's actually controlled over a serial port - is that right? Seems like it would be pretty easy, if that's true, to come up with a driver for it - you wouldn't even need a device driver, but just a control library that knows how to talk to the serial port. Are you using it from Windows or from Linux? If Windows, wouldn't getting it running on Linux be a fun hack job? :')

This would be handy for me because it'd provide a way to master tapes for duplication without requiring me to put my hands on the machine all the time to cue up master tapes.

Anyway, stop fooling with your silly tape writing project and get going on telling us how this thing works! You can always write the tape using by running a Z80 emulator and running Tarbell BASIC on it, can't you?

Not a useful comparison

[V. Mole]

That's because the Windows XP CD doesn't include Office, or Exchange, or SQL Server, or Photoshop, or ... I think you know where I'm going with this. Still not a completely accurate comparison, but a lot closer.

Not to mention the sourcecode.

Re:Not a useful comparison

[NanoGator]

Yep, you're right. However, spanning that many CDs is dangerous. I tried to install Redhat 7 or 8 (I forget which, but I can tell you it was only 3 CDs, not 5.) and on the third disc, I discovered the media was bad. Redhat's installer wasn't smart enough to deal with an error like that, and never gave me the opportunity to 'retry'. Instead it just stopped. So I had a partly installed Linux that'd only work in CLI mode, and root had a blank password. Heh. I had to start the entire install over with a fresh set of discs. (Fortunately, this problem, if not solved already, is fairly easy to fix.)

In any event, I wasn't faulting RedHat for it in my original comment. I'm not mad at Redhat for that other than with the problem mentioned above, thought it was nice to not have to go download a bunch of stuff. What makes it interesting, though, is there are people out there who try to measure 'bloat' by how much space the install of an app takes up, and sometimes times change and work against you, as with the case of that poor AC.

Not

[fm6]

You lose some information when encoding to MP3, but that information you lose may not be important.

But how do you know whether important information has been lost? You'd need a pretty thorough understanding of the theory behind the MP3 algorithm to know that. Which might well lead to a variation that can safely compress a data stream -- but that's an exercise in advanced computer science, not casual hardware hacking.

A more useful 'Ask Slashdot' question.

[IM6100]

A more useful cassette tape oriented question that I have been thinking about is: Has anybody come up with a software package to emulate an audio cassette deck using a PC with a sound card? It seems like it would be a trivial task and it'd be cool for people with 'classic' hardware. The old TRS-80 or Sinclair 1000 would be more useful with a 100% reliable storage system like an old Pentium Machine that mimics a cassette. It would need audio in/out and possibly a digital input for 'motor control' that many old computers used.