Okay, this isn't strictly Linux related and is more a hardware issue, but I'll be using a Linux PC in text-mode for anything in the solution the requires my PC. Okay, so I want to rip my collection of 4-track audio cassettes, but none of them are the standard format used for Music back in the days before CDs. Some of them are Library for the Blind/Free Matter for the Blind format(i.e. half-speed and mono, playback in a regular tape player would result in doubled speed and different parts of the program overlapping), and some are 2-XL format(i.e. normal speed, mono, with tracks 2/4 reversed. Playback in a normal player results in program overlap on side 1 and reversed playback on side 2). I have the means to play these tapes properly(a library for the blind tape deck and a Tiger 2XL Robot) as well as a portable media player with line-in recording(a blaze ET) and the right kind of cable to connect cassette player's earphone jack to recorder's line-in jack, but it seems rather tedius to rely on a method that takes the full run time of the source(or 4 times the run time for the 2XL tapes) to make a digital copy, and I would assume such is far from being the least lossy means of ripping cassette tapes not to mention that the resulting rips of a 2XL tape might not be in sync. Ideally, I'd like a method that would be able to capture all 4 tracks from a cassette in a single pass and at an accelerated pace and account for the oddities of format in the tapes I'm working with(i.e. extra speed correction on the LFB/FMB tapes and joining the tracks as single mono stream instead of pairwise into a stereo stream, composing the 2XL tapes into a single quad channel stream while accomodating two of the tracks being reversed on tape), and with minimum loss of fidelity. Also, if anyone knows a command line program that, given a multi-channel stream, can play one channel at the time and switch between them on the fly with a single keypress, that would be useful. Also, perhaps the easier problem, since its dealing with current tech rather than tech from 25+ years ago, I recieve several audio magazine subscriptions on digital cartridge, and depending on what else is on my plate, I sometimes struggle to find enough time to listen to a cartridge's contents within the window I have before I need to mail the cartridge back. I would like to extract the content of the cartridges so I can listen at my leisure and put them on my Blaze ET, which is far more portable than the digital cartridge player I have(it's nice for home listening, but completely unwieldy for listening on the go). The cartridges are basically just flash drives, but the casing is shaped in a way that prevents plugging them into a USB port on a desktop computer, and while a USB extension cable seems like the obvious solution, every such cable I've ever owned has a guard around the connector on the end the cartridge would plug in to, again preventing the connection. Assuming there's no proprietary filesystem on the cartridge, the solution should be as simple as finding a USB extension cable with unguarded connectors, mounting the cartridge on my PC and copying files, but I'm not sure how to find such a cable, and my attempts to remove the guard from a cable myself resulted in ruined cables. Any assistance with either of these issues would be greatly appreciated. -- Sincerely, Jeffery Wright President Emeritus, Nu Nu Chapter, Phi Theta Kappa. Former Secretary, Student Government Association, College of the Albemarle. _______________________________________________ Blinux-list mailing list Blinux-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list