forum.defence-force.org

Hello,

Having looked on the oric ceo site to see that software is listed but blank on all fields

I have this software but need advice how to archive on to oric ceo site

I am waiting for modern USB cassette transfer machine to arrive to transfer cassette tape to mp3.

I can scan instruction sheet 600dpi

I can scan cassette labels both sides

I can scan cassette sleeve

regards

john uk

That is excellent news. Finding copies of old missing software is great. I think Symoon is your man. He is a real expert in preserving software from tapes.

Thanks indeed!

Hi there,

Actually, I had the transfer done since 2012.
It's now all up on Oric.org
(remember to log in to see the stuff section with manual and so on)

Regarding tape transfers, MP3 is not the way to go. The best (speaking for myself here) is recording at 44kHz, stereo, 8-bits. Stereo because having right and left channels gives two more chances to have a good recording. 44kHz and 8-bit because that's the format the conversion tools are waiting for.

MP3 is a lossy (i.e. losing data) compression mode, so it may work... Or not. And would need to be converted back to WAV anyway. In short, it makes things random and complicated

jdavis6809 wrote: ↑Mon Nov 18, 2019 2:57 pm I am waiting for modern USB cassette transfer machine to arrive to transfer cassette tape to mp3.

Most (all?) of the modern USB tape drives, from the 15$ "Super USB Cassette Capture" to the "Aldi Boombox", to the "Toshiba Aurex ‘Hi-Res Cassette deck’" or expensive "TASCAM 202ᴍᴋVII" are using similar low-end mechanism made by Tanishin because they are the last company still producing tape mechanism.

Basically the only difference is the quality of the rest of the hardware, so the signal processing, amplifiers, power supply, etc... but in term of actual quality of what get loaded from the tape, it's more or less the same, and it's about the quality of what you would get from a low end tape drive from the end of the 90ies.

And yes, I have one of these, I tried it, could load some tapes, failed with many other :-/

Dbug wrote: ↑Mon Nov 18, 2019 9:33 pm Most (all?) of the modern USB tape drives, from the 15$ "Super USB Cassette Capture" to the "Aldi Boombox", to the "Toshiba Aurex ‘Hi-Res Cassette deck’" or expensive "TASCAM 202ᴍᴋVII" are using similar low-end mechanism made by Tanishin because they are the last company still producing tape mechanism.

Oh, it looks like you are also a viewer of Techmoan's videos.

As a side note, a good format to store digital data from cassette is the (SD-)LEP format. It is reported to work on ORIC as well as many other machines and is available with a nice TFT UI interface.

sam wrote: ↑Mon Nov 18, 2019 10:50 pm Oh, it looks like you are also a viewer of Techmoan's videos.

When I get interested in a topic, I try to collect as much as information about it, so in this case I started to look at Oric tape loading problem, because that was wrecking havok in my plans to show real games on the real oric loaded from original real tapes.

Since then I learnt about the various mechanisms (direct, belt), why a 3 heads is much better than a 2 heads model if you want to record, wow and flutter, bias, difference between the various types of tapes, if it was better to use new old stock tapes or brand new ones, etc...

sam wrote: ↑Mon Nov 18, 2019 10:50 pm As a side note, a good format to store digital data from cassette is the (SD-)LEP format. It is reported to work on ORIC as well as many other machines and is available with a nice TFT UI interface.

Interesting, did not know about that one
Thanks.