Lmst

“Why I Quit #Streaming And Got Back Into #Cassettes”

When I came to Tokyo, a friend took me to a store that sold cheap portable cassette players, and I knew it wouldn’t be a huge leap to take my music listening fully offline. The #walkman I bought is unbranded and has a transparent plastic shell, allowing you to watch all the little mechanical gears turning inside as the tape spools around the wheels and past the playheads. It was one of the easiest purchasing decisions I’ve made in recent memory: After years of psychic damage from social media and other phone-based #distractions, I was ready to once again have a dedicated device that does nothing but play music.

#DataCassette / #music / #offline <https://404media.co/why-i-quit-streaming-and-got-back-into-cassettes/>

How’s your day going? Mine is cleaning the dissolved remains of the drive and counter belts of this old tape recorder and finding replacements. 😅

I am covered in the black goo, send help!!!

#Retro #RetroTech #TapeRecorder #Cassette #CassetteRecorder #DataCassette #OldComputers #ComputoneCRC1001

The inside of a 40-year old tape recorder. It’s all mechanical parts, wheels, spindles and old circuitry

a8cas-convert is often great, but I'm finding #Altirra does a more reliable job of successfully turning (ancient) eight-bit data tape audio into a successfully loaded program.

Looks like a8cas-convert has been effectively abandoned since 2015: https://a8cas.sourceforge.net/news.html

#Atari800 #Atari8bit #DataCassette #Atari410 #BinaryDump #NoFilesystem

A screenshot of the Altirra Atari 8-bit emulator running in Wine on Xubuntu. It's displaying the cassette waveform window and a screenful of a successfully CLOADed program listing.

A terminal window on Linux showing an invocation of `a8cas-convert`, which fails on the last block.

Trying to recover more programs from #cassette tapes recorded with the #Atari #program #recorder in the early 1980s. Type-a-tune doesn't seem to be recoverable. Look at that drop-out! #a8cas-convert can't turn the audio into a valid CAS file either.

Just 12 milliseconds of data are missing, but that makes this #program unrecoverable.

I learned to #CSAVE a program twice in succession after getting caught out like this a few times.

#retrocomputing #datacassette #nofilesystem #binarydump

A screenshot of the program Audacity displaying both waveform and spectrogram for about 300 milliseconds of audio representing binary data. There's a dropout of just 12 milliseconds where the amplitude of the wave drops to zero, meaning no data is discernable.

A screenshot of the Altirra 8-bit Atari emulator running under Wine on Xubuntu Linux. The Atari display shows "ERROR - 143 AT LINE 0" and Altirra's "Cassette Tape Control" window shows the tape stopped after the sixth data block.

A screenshot of a terminal in Linux showing `a8cas-convert` finding two blocks containing errors. This is followed by the output of the `cat` command on the resulting CAS file; the name of the program in its tokenized BASIC form can be discerned; the program is TYPE-A-TUNE, which turned a row of the Atari's keyboard into a piano keyboard. Neither Altirra nor Linux's atari800 can successfully load the cassette in this format. (Though I've had excellent success with `a8cas-convert` on other programs on this same tape.)

What have you used #cassette #tapes for?
— Recording / Playback of #music?
— Computer #data such as #games or other programmes / #files?
— Something else I didn't think/know of?

Or do you have no idea what a #cassetteTape is?

#poll #polls #dataCassette #retroGaming #retroComputers #audio #MusicCassette #CompactCassette

I was saddened to hear that #C64 #Chiptune composer #BenDaglish died earlier this month of #lungcancer: https://www.facebook.com/BenDaglishC64/posts/2460586427292350
So, I'll have another listen to the #MSX version of his theme for M.A.S.K. III: VENOM Strikes Back: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5aMpRVScEl0&t=354s (skip to 5:54 to avoid the #datacassette loading noise).

#DataCassette

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