The cable is standard, in that it's a standard USB cable with standard
uSB male and female connectors. What you need to watch for though is
that the female end will fit into the cartridge. Not all USB cables have
a female end with a thin enough profile to slide into the space allowed
by the cartridge.
On 09/11/2017 09:15 AM, Linux for blind general discussion wrote:
The cartridges are typically formatted as FAT32.
A cable doesn't come with a cartridge, and as you discovered, it's not quite standard.
I think it will be a few extra weeks before a 16 GB cartridge becomes available.
The NLS player has a second USB port on its right side, behind the headphone jack. This was originally intended for diagnostics and for remote control. But if a cartridge is not connected to the cartridge port, you can play content from a USB stick attached to this side port. The port is normally covered by a tiny pop-off piece of plastic.
Since the NLS player is an 11-year-old design running Linux 2.4.2 on a 266-MHz ARM processor with 16 megs of RAM, it has some trouble coping with really large drives containing thousands of files. And it cannot unzip anything. But it has been used successfully with drives of up to 64 GB in size.
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: Monday, September 11, 2017 4:48 AM
To: Linux for blind general discussion
Cc: IAVIT Tech Talk List
Subject: Re: Digitizing audio cassettes and extracting the contents of digital cartridges.
Cables are standard. I don't recall what the female connector end is
called, but it's a standard USB extension cable type of connector, i.e.
you can plug one end of the cable into the other.
Perkins sells the cables on line, as ell as 4Gb NlS-style cartridges. I
believe LS&S and APH also sell them.
The cartridges need to be VFAT formatted.
hth
Janina
Linux for blind general discussion writes:
Okay, I'v managed to find Perkins branded Digital Cartridges on
Amazon, but there doesn't seem to be any listings for the cables. Does
anyone know if the cartridges include the cables? Either way, I'm
tempted to pick up a 16GB cartridge as a stop gap for playing the
encrypted files if I can't figure out how to play them on my Blaze ET
or Linux PC, though considering how anemic 16GB is for storage this
day and age, I find myself wondering if my digital cartridge player
can play audiobooks stored on an SD card in a dongle-style reader
connected to the USB port on the side of the player. *Tries it with
the 256GB card from my Blaze ET.* Okay, its been beeping for a few
minutes and the pause, fast forward, and rewind buttons just play a
please wait message with no explanation. I can only assume its trying
to scan the SD card for compatible files.
Given a suggestion to use a standard tape deck to rip two of a
cassette's four tracks at a time and do post processing to account for
tapes having non-standard formats, I've been searching for a suitable
one on Amazon, and while there are several rather affordable models
designed specifically for converting cassettes to digital files, it
isn't always clear which models are stand-alone, which rely on a PC
and specific drivers, and which should work with any recording device
with a line-in/microphone jack, and many sound like they're hardcoded
to output mp3, which I deem completely unacceptable in this age of
terabyte harddrives and 256GB memory cards, and even cutting record
time by more than half isn't worth lossy compression when I already
have a recording device with line-in and wav support, and there's no
mention of sample rate or bit depth on any of the product pages I've
checked. If anyone has any suggestions for cutting through the cruft,
it would be greatly appreciated.
I've only ever used sox for concatenating flac files, but I understand
its one of the most versatile command line tools for manipulating
streamed audio. Can anyone provide instructions on how to do the
following tasks in sox or via another command line tool?
-Reversing an audio stream in a way equivalent to playing an audio
cassette backwards.
-Altering the sample rate for playback without altering the samples
themselves. Also, am I correct that, if your analog source is playing
at double speed, you'd want to record at twice the target sample rate
before slowing the recording down?
-Splitting multi-channel files into single channels files or merging
single-channel files into multi-channel files.
-Trimming silence to a given length at the biginning/end of a stream
or splitting a stream into multiple files in the middle of internal
silence exceeding a certain length.
-Anything else that might be useful for the task at hand.
Oh, and my digital cartridge player eventually finished whatever it
was doing, but still offered no explanation, not even a "no content
found" message. The contents of my SD card seems unaffected putting it
back in my Blaze ET.
Sincerely,
Jeffery Wright
President Emeritus, Nu Nu Chapter, Phi Theta Kappa.
Former Secretary, Student Government Association, College of the Albemarle.
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Christopher (CJ)
Chaltain at Gmail
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