K-spin... Loading from tape/MP3?
Dunno if I'm posting this in the right section, but I have some old tapes I want to load via my PC's microphone socket.
Could I record the MP3 and do something with it?
I'm using K-spin emulator but cant get anywhere!
Could I record the MP3 and do something with it?
I'm using K-spin emulator but cant get anywhere!
Post edited by daveysludge on
Comments
The short answer re. mp3 is "no". Lossy compression designed for music is no good for storing speccy tapes, at least not with lots of tweaking of encoder settings.
Actually you can use MP3s of Spectrum tape images to be stored on a multimedia reader or on your PC as a data source. WinTZX does an excellent job at this while keeping the process as simple as possible.
However if you want to keep your data for storing I'd advice you to render them as WAV files and then decide if you want to simply store them as TZX files or converting them into MP3s, which you can do easily and succesfully with WinTZX.
My idea was to play the tape into the PC and record the sound with 'windows sound recorder' which would save as a WMA file.
Still a bit lost when it comes to TZX, 'tape images' and the like!
I'll try 'Spectrum Tape Loader' program I've found, but I think I have to mess around with the sound card settings!
If you have a sound card with a Line input (usually a blue socket on PCI cards) this is preferable to using the mic input (pink).
I would also suggest downloading something like audacity http://audacity.sourceforge.net/
Windows sound recorder is rather basic and doesn't really let you see what you've recorded (for getting audio levels right etc)
The point is that fiddling with mp3 encoding is something you do after you have a clean, preferably tzx-ed, recording of your tapes.
Just like scanning documents, you might make a jpg or something once you've finished processing it, but you scan to a bmp or tiff :)
Gonna try the STL program, it seems to be doing the trick by converting the inputted sound to a TZX file which I can load with the ZX Spin prog hopefully...
Then install any major emulator like Spectaculator, Spin or SpecEmu.
I also don't know what you call K-Spin.
You can try to load your .wav into emulator. If the quality is okay it'll load. If it is not okay then either it needs filtering or nothing'll help it.
Then use an utility called MakeTzx or Wav2Tzx to make a .tzx file. Tzx file works just like sound recording but it has 40 kilobytes and not 5 megabytes.
Heh, it's the "K" key on a rubber key 48k :)
You can actually load into spin directly from the sound card input, though I don't imagine you really want to be using a real tape every time :)
Only problem is my 1980's walkman is kicking up a lot of R:Tape loading errors!
I did think that may be a problem.
If you just want to play some games it would be much easier to download them in digital format from here, you know? ;)
But if yo're really having fun with tape player and making copy of YOUR cassettes, that's a different matter :)
@ Ralf: I'm trying to load up some games I made and saved back in the 90's, but tape quality and the cassette player leave a lot to be desired!
You know, people here are looking for a rare, missing and unpreserved games, unknown to a wider public.
Maybe you'd like to loan the tape to our tzxing experts, so they could do the job? They'll give it back, I can promise :)
Pretty BASIC, but it had a few machine code sub-routines.
I have the original graphics somewhere, I'll have a go at recreating and post them here!
You know what, I'm not sure I'm interested any more ;)
http://www.worldofspectrum.org/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=11
The proper guys may not notice our talking here :)