Tape loading

[ralferoo]

Or for about €3, ItS7 LCD Screen Metal Mini Clip-on MP3 Player or 3.5mm Stereo In-ear Red Headset

BTW, this link hilights what is becoming a very annoying feature of ebay auctions... When you search for something you get e.g. here an MP3 player for an expensive price or headphones for a lower price. When you search for the MP3 player it shows up as the cheaper price.

I've seen things that are about £10 but appear as £1 because they've offered something pointless as one of the "options".

[robcfg]

The twat went and changed the price. Then buy them here for a little bit more: helle Farbe Mini MP3 Player Spieler mit Clip Musik Player Metall Aluminium Neu |

Bryce.

The color will sent randomly... LoL! 

[Bryce]

@Ralf: Yeah, I just noticed that recently and I also thought FTW!?!

@Rob: Who cares, I was going to rip it apart anyway! If I was going to use it as a normal MP3 player I'd sand it back down to the aluminium to make it grey/silver.

Bryce.

[gerald]

I am really wondering what you're all talking about 

All I get when following you links is

Bryce link :
Aufgrund rechtlicher Bestimmungen in manchen Ländern wurde der Zugang zu diesem Artikel leider gesperrt. Wir haben Ihren Zugriff auf diesen Artikel gesperrt, da wir verpflichtet sind den Zugang zu unzulässigen Artikeln zu beschränken. Es kann leider vorkommen, dass wir den Zugang zu machen Angeboten sperren, obwohl das jeweilige Angebot nicht gegen die rechtlichen Bestimmungen verstößt. Dies geschieht aufgrund technischer Beschränkungen. Wir möchten uns bei Ihnen für etwaige daraus entstandene Unannehmlichkeiten entschuldigen und hoffen, dass Sie andere interessante Artikel auf eBay finden.

or

Ralferoo link :
Unfortunately, access to this particular item has been blocked due to legal restrictions in some countries. We are blocking your viewing in an effort to prevent restricted items from being displayed. Regrettably, in some cases, we may prevent users from accessing items that are not within the scope of said restrictions because of limitations of existing technology. Please accept our apologies for any inconvenience this may cause, and we hope you may find other items of interest on eBay.

I didn't now mp3 player were illegal in France 

[Gryzor]

€51? Again, he's nuts From one extreme to the other!


€3 is still pretty good

[Bryce]

@Gerald: They're not illegal, but as far as I know, there is a hefty tax on MP3 players in France and to stop people avoiding the tax by buying outside the country they block them if they come from China (or so I've been told).

Bryce.

[gerald]

@Gerald: They're not illegal, but as far as I know, there is a hefty tax on MP3 players in France and to stop people avoiding the tax by buying outside the country they block them if they come from China (or so I've been told).

Ok, as I could not see who was selling it 

It looks like ebay is over-protecting themselves. The tax on mp3 player (or anything that can store copyrighted 'cultural' stuff), has to be paid by the one that import the product in France, not the seller. So in this case me, not the chinese vendor nor ebay !
The funny thing, is that it is nearly impossible for someone to pay this tax if they wanted to 

[Bryce]

Yes, I had this discussion a while ago with the French half of the family. They all think the tax is a joke. My MP3 player certainly doesn't have anything on it that anyone would call cultural .

Bryce.

[AMSDOS]

I was hoping someone could help me with my CDT problems 


I typed-in this early Amstrad game which is unfriendly when AMSDOS is present and thought it would be a good example to have something original you could load from Tape    What I've done is to get it onto CPCE, save it as CSW and had no problems with that, followed by recording the sound into a WAV. I downloaded CPCTapeXP, though the WAV from CPCE wasn't successful, but after I ran the program through Avrack and record the sound at 16000Khz, 8bit, Mono I think, from it everything seemed to start working and sounded all good. But after I used CPCTapeXP and ran it through Winape, the tempo sounded slightly faster even though the program successfully loaded, I recorded the original at Speed Write 0 after having problems with Speed Write 1 earier, but now I've sent the program to Kukulcan whose having problems with it.


My question is, Is there a preferred rate I should be recording the sound at, or is recording using PCs, Soundcards, Emulation bad? Just seems that if someone has gone to the trouble of writing CPCTapeXP then it should be possible to take a WAV recording and construct to a CDT. Can someone advise what's happened to my CDT file by listening to it?


EDIT: The problem I should point out is some blocks get picked up and others are being missed. I tried this CDT file I've attached in Winape and worked, even though the tempo for it sounded too fast for Speed Write 0, but seemed to get worse the higher the Baud Rate increased.


Thanks.

[Devilmarkus]

I usually use 44.100hz, mono, 16bit to record tapes.

BTW.: Your game resets the CPC while playing?!? Or is that a CPC464-6128 issue?

[Devilmarkus]

I re-recorded your tape using JavaCPC and converted the WAV to CDT, too...

Result:

[AMSDOS]

I usually use 44.100hz, mono, 16bit to record tapes.

BTW.: Your game resets the CPC while playing?!? Or is that a CPC464-6128 issue?

It's actually an AMSDOS issue, I got Kukulcan to document it on their website, so what happens is when the Bomb hits bottom  or a negative result, this bit of code to shake the city is called:

Code Select Expand

1120 IF b<=0 THEN MOVE g,b:PRINT CHR$(32);:SOUND 2,100,10,7,0,0,5:FOR p1=1 TO 3:OUT &400,4:OUT &100,39:FOR p=0 TO 10:NEXT p:OUT &400,4:OUT &100,38:FOR p=1 TO 8:NEXT:NEXT


so if AMSDOS is present when OUT &100,39 is done, the system crashes. I found if you change the code you can still get the city to shake without crashing the system by altering those to lower values, for me having 38 & 37 worked respectively. But for the tape I thought I'd leave the problem alone and disable AMSDOS.


I'll try your suggestion and use 44.100hz along with those settings and see if that makes a difference.


EDIT: I forgot to stress that's an early Type-in from Popular Computing Weekly (circa Oct 1984), so it initially wouldn't have been a problem.

[arnoldemu]

It's actually an AMSDOS issue, I got Kukulcan to document it on their website, so what happens is when the Bomb hits bottom  or a negative result, this bit of code to shake the city is called:

Code Select Expand

1120 IF b<=0 THEN MOVE g,b:PRINT CHR$(32);:SOUND 2,100,10,7,0,0,5:FOR p1=1 TO 3:OUT &400,4:OUT &100,39:FOR p=0 TO 10:NEXT p:OUT &400,4:OUT &100,38:FOR p=1 TO 8:NEXT:NEXT

Change the &400 to &bc00 and the &100 to &bd00 and it'll work with amsdos.

[AMSDOS]

Change the &400 to &bc00 and the &100 to &bd00 and it'll work with amsdos.

Hmm okay, so should I avoid using &400 and &100? To be honest I'm not sure I check those statements out on a 6128 and it is an early 464 program.  


&BC00 and &BD00 are generally wider accepted when using OUT aren't they. 

[ralferoo]

My question is, Is there a preferred rate I should be recording the sound at, or is recording using PCs, Soundcards, Emulation bad? Just seems that if someone has gone to the trouble of writing CPCTapeXP then it should be possible to take a WAV recording and construct to a CDT. Can someone advise what's happened to my CDT file by listening to it?

EDIT: The problem I should point out is some blocks get picked up and others are being missed. I tried this CDT file I've attached in Winape and worked, even though the tempo for it sounded too fast for Speed Write 0, but seemed to get worse the higher the Baud Rate increased.

I have this, and I think it's partially a problem with the CDT format originally being the Speccy TZX format. All the timings are based on 3.5MHz, so finding something that divides accurately to 44100Hz is tricky. From the docs, "direct recording" has this warning that seems to apply to all modes:

The preferred sampling frequencies are 22050 or 44100 Hz (158 or 79 T-states/sample). Please, if you can, don't use other sampling frequencies.

For me, with an MP3 tape adapter plugged into my PC and the "tape" in the 464, SPEED WRITE 1 works about 90% of the time, but randomly not all the time. SPEED WRITE 0 works about 99% of the time, but not EVERY time! I also thought that the real SPEED WRITE 0 sounds "broken" even though it usually loads OK.

For breaking baud, I made all the timings multiples of 79 T-states (in 3.5MHz terms) to give myself the best chance of being able to record it to tape.

Also for the original loader part, instead of 1000 baud SPEED WRITE 0, I used 15*79 and 30*79 T-states for 0/1 lengths, so average 984.5 baud (3500000/79/45) which sounds much "nicer to the ear" than what 2cdt produced for me at 1000 baud.

If you want to try to generate a CDT from code, check out the python code in breaking baud: https://github.com/ralferoo/breaking-baud/blob/master/cdt.py and if you just want to modify your existing CDT file as saved by an emulator, I'd recommend reading the TZX format spec (TZX technical specifications) and then hex editing each recording block to change the zero and one and pilot tone lengths to be closer to multiples of 79 T-states, and ensuring that the one length is exactly double the zero length rather that being slightly off...

You might also find your sound card is actually natively 48000Hz, so there might be additional timing loss from the CDT to 44100Hz WAV and then from that to 48000Hz playback.

[ralferoo]

BTW from the breaking baud source, the following is close to what you need:

Code Select Expand


import cdt
...
def loader(self,name,display,addr=0x8000,exaddr=0x8000):     
  i = open(name,"rb")     
  s = i.read()     
  i.close()     
  self.cdt.pause(250).cpcfile(display,2,s,addr,exaddr)     
  return self
...
cdt=cdtfile(93) # 93 is not used for AMSDOS files, it's for the breaking baud load system
cdt.loader(name,"BREAKING BAUD",0x8000,0x8000)
cdt.write(dst)

You'd want to change the type from 2 to whatever BASIC is (I think it's 1, but it's been a long time so I probably forgot!