Could the Datasette players play music cassette tapes too?

dj2eclipse · Post by **dj2eclipse** » Mon Jul 11, 2011 5:15 pm

I am curious if the Datasette players had the capability to play music cassette tapes? If so, what was the setup, a speaker right to the player? Or could one even pull audio from a 1702 monitor?

merman · Post by **merman** » Mon Jul 11, 2011 7:22 pm

I remember a listing in ZZAP! once that "read" music from the cassette and played it back through the SID chip...

e5frog · Post by **e5frog** » Mon Jul 11, 2011 7:53 pm

The head is mono so you won't get any stereo sound. I also had some sampler program that could record audio from the datassette - sounded awful...

I think you'd have to mod the datassette to get proper sound out of it.

Check the schematics here, maybe you can grab sound at the right amplifier:
http://www.zimmers.net/anonftp/pub/cbm/ ... index.html

Oge_user · Post by **Oge_user** » Tue Jul 12, 2011 7:46 am

This Turbo Tape Utility seems to be able to play tapes. Try it and let us know: http://www.megaupload.com/?d=U88XZ1NX

Cheers,
Oge

e5frog · Post by **e5frog** » Tue Jul 12, 2011 8:07 am

I'm guessing you'd need to pull audio directly from the datassette to get proper audio quality, going through the SID would drag it down. It also seems the signal is amplified until sine waves change into square waves in the datassette. But a wire on one of the OP-amps, should do the trick.

That turbo-program was kind of fun, very weak sound with a lot of static when listening to a data-tape in WinVICE.

enthusi · Post by **enthusi** » Tue Jul 12, 2011 8:43 am

You can play back music-tapes but that wont make you happy.
The datasette has an (two) inbuilt Schmitt-triggers which will completely brutalize the input ;-)
You can make it out but not too well.
Listening to it can be done in a few lines of code. Just watch the cass-flag in a loop and set the audio-volume accordingly. This way you sort of 1bit-sample the music on tape...
Cheers,
enthusi

Post by **TNT** » Tue Jul 12, 2011 8:49 am

enthusi wrote:Listening to it can be done in a few lines of code.

Right.

e5frog · Post by **e5frog** » Tue Jul 12, 2011 4:49 pm

Cool TNT, but it sounds like listening in a broken tweeter with very very low volume.

TNT's was better that the "hear"-mode in that turbo program though.

senorverde · Post by **senorverde** » Tue Jul 12, 2011 7:22 pm

I like to use FCS' Digitizer Datasette. Not only can you sit there and listen to a whole tape, but you can also record a portion and save it off to floppy (there's a small routine that tells you how you can play it in an assembler, but I never figured it out). So, let's see... Would the sound output of these programs be 1 bit in the end, as mentioned above (since the datasette loads and saves using on/off square waves)?

e5frog · Post by **e5frog** » Tue Jul 12, 2011 9:02 pm

This one then:
http://www.csdb.dk/release/download.php?id=45150

Not better than TNT's version, some annoying flashing colors, save feature is nice in case you manage to get something useful out of it.

Maybe it can be useful if you want to make a multimedia art installation or if you want to play "guess the song" with family or friends.

senorverde · Post by **senorverde** » Tue Jul 12, 2011 9:22 pm

I did this once with a friend. Grab a mix tape and some friends (alcohol optional) and take guesses at the screeching tunes.

. I can tell you for a fact that Datasette Digitizer does not like 80s synthpop

e5frog · Post by **e5frog** » Wed Jul 13, 2011 6:14 pm

Doesn't seem to like any pop-music but you can occasionally hear words or phrases and catch it on that.

Richard of TND · Post by **Richard of TND** » Tue Aug 30, 2011 9:09 pm

It is still possible to muck about and add digi-sampling to your commodore 64. All you need is a microphone or mobile phone PC software, a WAV/DIGI convertor (On PC) and a bit of programming (Or just run the DIGI .PRG as it does have a built in digitizer).

http://noname.c64.org/csdb/release/?id=6601

e5frog · Post by **e5frog** » Tue Aug 30, 2011 11:37 pm

Yes, probably a better way to do it - use the PC and copy the finished result to the C64.

airship · Post by **airship** » Wed Aug 31, 2011 6:11 pm

senorverde wrote:I like to use FCS' Digitizer Datasette.

More info, please?

Kim Lemon Beer

C64 Forever - Create & Play

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