I’m currently trying to set up a homebrew cassette tape storage format, but trying to use existing tech where possible. I was excited to see that minimodem already exists for converting an audio stream to a byte stream, and is even available in termux for android, so I could decode cassettes with my phone! However, I’d like some sort of higher-level tool to encode and decode “packets” or “slices” so that I can add error correction. I’m sure this sort of thing must exist for amature radio purposes.
I could write a script that cuts a file into slices, with checksums and redundancy for each slice, and then pads them with null bytes so I can isolate each frame when decoding. What I want is to find out if that’s already been done. I’ve heard of AX.25 packets but I can’t find a tool that does that with stdio.
Hmm… I think looking at this from a radio perspective isn’t helpful. I found more resources when ignoring the media. Perhaps par2 or RAR would be useful? Generate error correction media first, then write to media.
Generally in radio, you could just request a retransmission, so I didn’t find much from that angle.
You might also find something useful when looking at tape backup programs. You’re not using LTO, but the principles are the same, so maybe there’s some tooling that would be compatible.
I did use
par2andtarto generate redundancy, but I still need a way to locate it in the bytestream. Tar doesn’t seem to reliably mark the start or end of files :/What are you using to control/access the tape? tar should handle that just fine, considering that’s what it was originally made for.
I’m using a regular off-the-shelf tape recorder, it doesnt have an electronic interface, I just press play and record manually.
So how are you retrieving files? Writing down timestamps? Tar should be able to find the start of an archive if you give it a little lead-in.
That’s exactly what I thought would work, but it doesn’t.