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Old 8th Sep 2019, 5:39 pm   #1
Karen O
Rest in Peace
 
Join Date: Jul 2011
Location: Bridgnorth, Shropshire, UK.
Posts: 787
Default Digital 'cassette' recorder

I can't recall if I have already posted about this project. If I have, feel free to delete this post!

I confess to disliking computer apps immensely. I find them unintuitive, fragile, and infuriating. So, rather than settle for a computer-based audio record and playback system, I've built my own that has the ease and simplicity of an old school cassette recorder! The cassette is a compact flash card. The controls are a familiar row of locking buttons. The progress indicator is a numeric LED counter. None of your file system rubbish here - it just records linearly onto the sectors

I've made numerous compact flash readers before in order to generate obsolete television standards. This is the first time that I have attempted recording. The reason: the PICs driving these things have next to no buffering. The PIC simply cannot hang around while sectors are erased and written. A solution was found be pre-erasing the sectors prior to write. If you do this, then there is no write latency to speak of.

So far I've recorded a couple of albums onto the 'cassette' (capacity is about 170 minutes).

Cool eh?
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