Hi Shawn et al,
> Has anybody given any thought to a program which could convert a file into
> tones ( Say 1 tone per byte ), and recording it an MD? I was thinking about
> this, but wasn't sure it ATRAC would chew it up.
A load of early pc's inc. ibm recorded data to standard audio cassette
players, to a greater or lesser reliability. afaik they used two tones
only. It should be easy to substitute a md recorder instead of the
cassette unit and see how it works. I did some calculations a year or so
ago re. storing data as tones as phone touch tone dialling tones, since
the chips are readily available for this, and 'the standard' has already
been invented. Can't remember why I didn't carry on with it - I think it
may be due to the poor storage capacity/data rate. Never got round to
possible atrac probs., but guess that chosing suitable frequencies could
get round that. Very briefly, absolute approx. possible maximum data
rate about 100 Mb/hour (from md capacity and playing time). In reality,
say minimum tone freq. of 300 hz, and about 10 cycles required to
decode, and say 16 tones available = 4 bits, thus one byte needs two
tones, taking (1/300) * 10 * 2 seconds =20/300, or 15 bytes per second.
15 * 3600 = 54,000 bytes per hour or per md. Floppies seem better.
I have come across decoder chips that can gauge the frequency from the
time taken for a quarter cycle, which could get it up to about 2 Mb per
hour/md, which is still not worthwhile, imho.
For a software solution, I would prob. have to read the data back into
memory, or hdd, and analyse the file from there. It really needs a way
of by-passing the atrac, and be able to read/write directly in digital -
like a rw cd, say. These figures would be doubled if recording in mono -
which I guess would be more sensible. Another possibility is to record a
clock sync. signal on one track, and data on t'other - that would
probably give a better capacity. Maybe even morse code.....?
Best wishes,
Ray
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