5 ms·
If one was able to collect, say, a couple dozen tapes of the same game or magazine supplement, and the tapes all had different bits lost, would it be possible t
by bloopernova 8y ago
If one was able to collect, say, a couple dozen tapes of the same game or magazine supplement, and the tapes all had different bits lost, would it be possible to recreate the tape with the WAV representations?
May be a way to find a bunch of different tapes on ebay, and recreate old classics.
EDIT: this is actually performed later in the article, whoops, I should have read the whole thing before commenting.
- corint 8y agoThat's what I was thinking as well; I wonder if it would be as simple as recording all of them, aligning them in Audacity and playing back the resultant mix? Any dropouts on one tape would be largely overruled by the (strong) signal from all the good tapes?
- mrob 8y agoAligning them is non-trivial because of "wow and flutter" caused by variation of the tape speed. Even if your tape player has perfectly stable tape speed the original recorder wouldn't have had it. Maybe you could calculate some inverse-wow-and-flutter distortion that minimizes the difference between the tracks.
- PavlovsCat 8y agoJust have each tape owner read it to the best ability of their drive, and then compare the results centrally: for each byte, take that which occurs in the most results. I would assume that where tapes fail, they all fail differently. And that should also work for floppy disks, right?
- zellyn 8y agoIn the article, they did this at the file level.
- bloopernova 8y agoI admit I did not read that far. I'm remedying that right now.