I'll answer at least some of your questions. First of all, you can save yourself a lot of aggravation by setting up an account on BARD, the NLS Braille and Audio Reading Download service. Magazines recorded by NLS since about 2007 are all available on the site. Books that originally were distributed on 4-track cassette are being converted to digital from the open-reel masters. The conversion process is nearly complete, and most of these books sound much better than they did on cassette. Your regional library should be able to get you a cable for connecting a computer to a cartridge; it's one of our lesser-known free accessories. Also, several agencies that sell blank cartridges also sell compatible USB cables for about $5. The file system for digital talking books from NLS is FAT32. The audio is encrypted, so you will need to transfer each magazine issue as a folder of files to be played by your HIMS player. If you haven't already done so, you'll need to authorize your player for use of NLS content. If you have more questions, you can write back to me at lras@xxxxxxx . Lloyd Rasmussen, Senior Staff Engineer National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped, Library of Congress Washington, DC 20542 202-707-0535 http://www.loc.gov/nls/ The preceding opinions are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Library of Congress, NLS. -----Original Message----- From: blinux-list-bounces@xxxxxxxxxx [mailto:blinux-list-bounces@xxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Linux for blind general discussion Sent: Thursday, September 07, 2017 12:51 PM To: . fIAVIT Tech Talk List; Linux for blind general discussion Subject: Digitizing audio cassettes and extracting the contents of digital cartridges. 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 _______________________________________________ Blinux-list mailing list Blinux-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list