Encoding Data for Audio Tape? 81
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 (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:tape yes, mp3 yes too. (Score:2)
Obviously binary data and human speech are incredibly different - heck, one is digital and the other is analog. That doesn't change the fact that it's theoretically possible. Of course I doubt it would be practical in any situation I can think of - y
Not (Score:3, Interesting)
HAM, Supercharger and MiniDisc, Oh My! (Score:1)
>>I posted a question on a MiniDisc forum a few months back about using an MD to record data.
>>
>>I know there was an MDData drive back in the day that held 140MB. Course it was made by Sony
>>so nothing was interchangeable; the disks were not standard MD disks.
>>
>>From what I know about MD, the data is converted into ATRAC
From the linked thread (Score:3, Troll)
"The next version of Windows should fit on 5000 of these..."
Just thought it was amusing that Windows XP is distributed on one CD, RedHat is distributed with 5.
(Sorry, NFI how to answer this guy's question...)
Not a useful comparison (Score:3, Interesting)
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 (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Not a useful comparison (Score:2)
Re:Not a useful comparison (Score:3, Insightful)
--
Re:Not a useful comparison (Score:1)
Fedora also fails gracefully. I had some media problems and was able to make new CDs and continue without having to outsmart the installer (as another poster discribed.)
-Peter
Re:Not a useful comparison (Score:2)
Re:Not a useful comparison (Score:2)
You should still have the option of being able to put another copy of the disc in. We have several laying around the office. If I could just have popped in another disk it would have saved hours.
Re:From the linked thread (Score:2)
Re:From the linked thread (Score:2)
Re:From the linked thread (Score:2)
Re:From the linked thread (Score:2)
Re:From the linked thread (Score:2)
Not trying to be an ass here, but I'm not sure why you're pointing this out.
Re:From the linked thread (Score:1)
Re:From the linked thread (Score:2)
So yeah, whatever.
Re:From the linked thread (Score:1)
Re:From the linked thread (Score:2)
Re:From the linked thread (Score:1)
To be fair, Microsoft added Hearts, Spider Solitaire, Internet Hearts, Internet Backgammon and Internet Checkers to their already strong lineup of Freecell, Solitaire, Minesweeper and Pinball.
Re:From the linked thread (Score:2)
When you install from the single WinXP disk, you get an OS, a bootloader, a browser, a graphics viewer, an e-mail client, and a file manager. Maybe some games, a calculator, and a text editor.
RedHat, OTOH, comes with all of the above, in about 7 flavors of each. You get Evolution, The Gimp, Mozilla, 2 full desktop environments, tons of games (some quite good like FreeCiv and BZFlag), several m
Re:From the linked thread (Score:1)
Yes, but if Microsoft h
Re:From the linked thread (Score:2)
If RedHat bundled RH web server, RH desktop, RH e-mail, and RH web browser, then people would be pissed. Hell, people got pissed when RH tried to bundle a KDE/Gnome theme.
Re:From the linked thread (Score:2)
If people who wanted to use Linux for the first time were effectively TOLD what to use on that platform, it'd be a lot more standardized, rather than the mess of 7 flavors of text editors, office suits, boot loaders, desktop environments, etc.
There's something to be said to unilateral dictation of the user experience -- every Windows XP machine in the world, save a few, is going to look and act the same, share a common interface, and have a few apps that are the same regardless of where
Brings back memories (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Brings back memories (Score:1)
Actually, I had three computers with tape drives. One was the ZX81 with an elderly desk tape recorder. The ZX81 had to switch off the screen routine while it was handling the mo/dem to tape. I'm not making this up.
Then there was the Sinclair ZX Spectrum. By the time I got this, I had some awful MIDI HiFi system that was about 50 times the size of the computer, but it did have good enough fidelity to retrieve iffy pirate copies of Elite every other attempt or
Re:Brings back memories (Score:2)
This looks like a pretty cool product. (Score:3, Interesting)
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?
Re:This looks like a pretty cool product. (Score:5, Informative)
The device itself is quite simple. It's a 5.25" device with a standard power connection. It also has a ribbon cable that runs to a simple adapter that fits in a slot in the case (thought it doesn't plug in like a card) -- from there you connect it to audio in/out and a serial port. Software is seriously basic and I think Windows only, but you can just set a few settings and press a button to have it convert an entire tape, both sides, to an MP3 file. I then cut it up using MP3DirectCut. Just converted an old Vangelis tape yesterday.
So, yeah, it's basically a tape drive with Line In / Line Out and a serial port. However, I'm barely a programmer, just a bit of PHP and SQL, no C, no drivers, no comms, so I'm not up to the task of writing anything myself.
Geez (Score:3, Flamebait)
And then it turns out that's actually what he wants to do!
Suggestion -- here's your opportunity to learn a bit about file I/O. You know how to write to and read from the device? Hack at it a bit and write your own toy utility. That'll benefit you far more than finding something on Sourceforge and playing with it for 5 minutes.
Re:Geez (Score:2)
Then, use tar to copy files to it. Then you'd be cool.
--Robert
encode mp3s on the tape (Score:2)
Re:encode mp3s on the tape (Score:2)
If you figure this out.... (Score:2)
Re:If you figure this out.... (Score:2)
Re:If you figure this out.... (Score:2)
Why not? (Score:3, Funny)
Use an acoustic coupler (Score:2)
Or maybe you can find a low-baud-rate emulator somewhere.
Re:Use an acoustic coupler (Score:1)
I think you mean 300. At least if you were in the U.S. I never encountered a 400 baud one.
Ah, acoustic coupler goodness. (Insert flashback effects here...) First programming I ever did was in a summer program for "gifted" kids, in 1981, at Western Maryland College. They had a PDP-11. The only connection from the terminal room to the computer was dial-up over the campus phone system. With acoustic coupler modems. And, I can't be sure after all these
A more useful 'Ask Slashdot' question. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:A more useful 'Ask Slashdot' question. (Score:2)
Of course, you're looking for a little more than this, and I'm not sure (since I haven't played with any other machines on MESS) if it can do that exact functionality with others... works f
Can you tell I've done something similar before? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Can you tell I've done something similar before (Score:2)
So, per audio channel he can reliably encode 56Kbps. So, 112Kbps using both audio channels. That works out to 14000 Bytes per second, 840,000 bytes per minute and 50,400,000 bytes per hour.
I'm dumbfounded. Thats 48Megabytes per hour of recordable tape.
Amusingly enough that all cancels out and gets you aproximately 48 minutes of 128Kbps MP3...
Re:Can you tell I've done something similar before (Score:1)
G1: Oh yeah, well I can play back audio encoded in MP3, modulated to analog, then recorded to tape!
G2: Oh, well my dad has a scanning electron microscope!! <runs for the door>
What about that Cuttle Cart thing? (Score:2)
So there you go--software that will encode a file as audio th
Re:What about that Cuttle Cart thing? (Score:2)
In fact, the work done on converting SuperCharger tapes to files and subsquently back into clean audio is what inspired my question.
Currently I'm trying to find a program that will process C64 tape recordings into .c64 files. However, the typical way to move C64 tape
my question (Score:5, Funny)
Re:my question (Score:1)
Boy do I miss those days. Wait...no I don't.
Re:my question (Score:2)
thanks.
Re:my question (Score:2)
i hope i hope i hope (Score:3, Funny)
I hope this is possible. I want to see if i can induce some sort of ass-backwards, retro-technical vortex that will suck cars from one location to another.
Reed-Solomon error correction coding (Score:2)
As an alternative, you could write the data to tape with recovery blocks inter-spersed.
e.g. chop the data file into smaller files, use PAR/PAR2 to create recovery files and dump the whole lot onto the audio tape. On the other end, pull the audio data back off, ignoring errors, and run the PAR/PAR2 t
They call it "CLOAD" (Score:2)
The problems were numerous, and it was a BIG hassle to store more than one program on a tape.
Atari, trash80, vic20, C64, TI, timex sinclair all had tape interfaces. But everybody was more than willing to dump it for a more expensive disk drive.
.
Re:They call it "CLOAD" (Score:1)
This thing was huge. And heavy. And noisy.
But if I were to want to save any block of memory, it was either use the monitor proggy to print/punch it, write it down on a notepad and key it in again, or build me a cassette drive interface, which I did.
I didn't have any other options. Remember, this was in the days before even the venerable Shugart-400. And how I longed for one of those 8" floppys, but the price was for me
Data Encoding (Score:2)
As for controlling the actual hardware, others have suggested Linux drivers. I agree.
For actually encoding the data into an audio stream, I would suggest googling for Amateur radio data protocols using modulation schemes like MFSK, QAM, Raised Cosine, etc. Hams have been battling the narrow bandwidth problem for a long time, and have come up with many encoding schemes to protect the data against fading, multipath, etc (many of which are also present on cassette recordings). this site [ac6v.com] gives examples of digit [ac6v.com]
Re:Data Encoding (Score:2)
Re:Data Encoding (Score:2)
There are a few constraints you need to look into.
Answers to these questions will help choose which encoding method is best for you.
The absolutely si
Re:Data Encoding (Score:1)
The magnetic domains on tape are nonlinear and would probably be tricky to get to work on any protocol needing linearity. To get audio on the tape, the analog people mix a 100KHz or so "bias frequency" into the record circuit. And very carefully watch the record levels.
The "flutter", or instantaneous speed variations of the tape - will wreak havoc with any phase-sensitive schemes. It will show up as a angular jitter ( rotation of the constellation ), otherwise known
QIC 80 (Score:2)
Before Sun started making computers they manufactured personal stereos. These were the precursor to the early Walkman. However, there was one problem: they used the old Sun Model 411 style data cartridges (1/4"), which are large and never really caught on.
Anyway, it's getting nearly impossible to find new releases on 1/4" cartridge, and I lost my 1/4" audio tape deck at Comdex '93, so I need to be able to record my mp3 colle
Re:QIC 80 (Score:1)
I'm afraid you can't use QIC audio tapes with a stock data drive, because the RIAA forced Sun to orient the magnetic domains 66% off-axis to prevent copying. Dead QICmans are pretty much the only source for the audio codec chip, and as I'm sure you already know, they sell for a small fortune on eBay.
There was a Usenet post a few years ago from someone who modified a southern-hemisphere VCR (the heads spin the other way) to read them; he made four mercury delay lines of different lengths out of thermometers
Re:QIC 80 (Score:1)
Old Microcomputer Magazines (Score:2)