Quick Question: whats the best way to turn a wave recording into a BBC Tape and/or extract the files from it?

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shawty
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Quick Question: whats the best way to turn a wave recording into a BBC Tape and/or extract the files from it?

Post by shawty »

Apologies if this has been asked before, or in the wrong part of the forum.

I know I've done this myself a long time ago, but my old grey matter is now starting to get rusty...

I've recovered what I believe to be BBC Micro Data off some old cassettes I've been digitizing...

Image

I've saved it as a 16bit 44,100 Khz Stereo Audio file, what's the quickest way to get it loaded into one of the emulators to see what data it contains?

Cheers
Shawty
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cmorley
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Re: Quick Question: whats the best way to turn a wave recording into a BBC Tape and/or extract the files from it?

Post by cmorley »

Google/search the forum for "UEF".

If you convert the tape to UEF then you can load that in your emulator of choice. e.g. BeebEm
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Re: Quick Question: whats the best way to turn a wave recording into a BBC Tape and/or extract the files from it?

Post by shawty »

cheers Chris.

I knew there where tools about, just couldn't remember what they where called etc.

shawty
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Re: Quick Question: whats the best way to turn a wave recording into a BBC Tape and/or extract the files from it?

Post by shawty »

Fantastic. Looks like I'm just in time then.

Saw a number of posts relating to this during my searches, but couldn't find where to download it.

will let you know how I get on.

cheers
shawty
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Re: Quick Question: whats the best way to turn a wave recording into a BBC Tape and/or extract the files from it?

Post by shawty »

@diminished I tried for 3 days to get Quadbike to do anything, and with no success.

All I get is "no output", not even a message to say bad file, no contents... nothing.

I've ran the program trying all sorts of different combos, I've tried all sorts of sample rates and formats from 8 bit mono @11k through to 16 bit stereo @ 44k

Eventually I gave up, and after a bit more research remembered that "BBCTapeDisk" (http://www.8bs.com/filecon.htm#beebtape) would do the job.

First run of that and I extracted files from the waves, as well as being able to play them in live via my Soundcard.

Looks like the tape was one of the Acorn Game compilations (No idea yet which one), managed to get all the files out, even though there where some "Bad Blocks", don't know if you want the waves to experiment with but the uncompressed sizes are 171mb for side A & 390Mb for Side B, I didn't want to MP3 them in case that damaged the audio.
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Re: Quick Question: whats the best way to turn a wave recording into a BBC Tape and/or extract the files from it?

Post by vanekp »

if you want to create a csw file from the wave then you need the following syntax
quadbike-avx2 -c "destination.csw" "source.wav"

if you are going to use tibetuef.php to create a UEF file then you need the following:
quadbike-avx2 -t "destination.tibet" "source.wav"

and then you can use c:\php\php -f c:\php\tibetuef.php "source.tibet" "destination.uef"

I had to download PHP to be able to run the tibetuef.php (under windows)
Regards Peter.
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Re: Quick Question: whats the best way to turn a wave recording into a BBC Tape and/or extract the files from it?

Post by Diminished »

shawty wrote: Tue Apr 04, 2023 2:07 pm @diminished I tried for 3 days to get Quadbike to do anything, and with no success.

All I get is "no output", not even a message to say bad file, no contents... nothing.
Well, that disappointing. Sorry to waste your time.

You didn't even get a single line of output from the program? Were you running it from the command-line? I probably should make it clear in the documentation that you're supposed to run it from the command-line. :/
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Re: Quick Question: whats the best way to turn a wave recording into a BBC Tape and/or extract the files from it?

Post by vanekp »

your source wav files are possible of very poor quality which will make it very difficult to extract anything useful out of them.
Regards Peter.
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Re: Quick Question: whats the best way to turn a wave recording into a BBC Tape and/or extract the files from it?

Post by shawty »

Sorry about the late replies, I got side-tracked by another job as often happens.

@Diminished - no need to apologize :-) but yes, I ran it from the command line, and no, not a single peep of any output from the quadbike tool, not even a version or a "hi I'm quadbike" banner etc...

If I could paste screen grabs direct into here, without linking them via some image sharing site or other, I'd show you in real-time via screen shots.

@vanekp - it's only the quadbike tool that doesn't work, if I use "bbctapedisk" as show here : http://www.8bs.com/filecon.htm#beebtape

I get files from the wave files I recorded, granted I get a bit of corruption and a few bad blocks, but I do get something, which is better than nothing :-)

--------
To wrap up however, this looks like it may have been a hooky copy of "Family favourite's games" or "5 computer hits" something like that. From what I was able to tell there's part of "Strykers run pt2 (Codename droid)" and "Wizz" on the tape, along with a few others.
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Re: Quick Question: whats the best way to turn a wave recording into a BBC Tape and/or extract the files from it?

Post by vanekp »

"quadbike -f" should give you at least the following output, and its best to run it from a command prompt or you may miss the output.
(Note I renamed the original file from quadbike-avx2.exe to quadbike.exe)

Code: Select all

F:\>quadbike -h

Quadbike 2.0.0, by 'Diminished' -- 29th March 2023.

Usage:

  quadbike [options] <input file>

Input file is audio supported by libsndfile (e.g. WAV, AIFF, maybe FLAC).

Output options:
  -!                    allow overwriting of output files (incl. inspect files)
  -t <filename>         output TIBET filename (default: qb.tibet)
  -z <filename>         output TIBETZ (gzipped TIBET) filename
  -o <filename>         output CSW filename
                        (-t, -z and -o may be provided in combination)
  --no-csw-phase-fix    do NOT autocorrect CSW phase for MakeUEF

Input options:
  -c (L|R)              pick channel from stereo file (left is default)
  -f                    bandpass-filter the input (not usually helpful)
  -n                    normalise the input (not usually helpful)

Sync options:
  -s <method>           sync recovery: <method> may be one of:
                          freq   frequency domain sync (fast);
                          walk   time domain sync      (slower);
                          pll    PLL sync              (slow) [default].

Phase detection options:
  -p <pmode>            input phase mode; <pmode> may be one of:
                          auto         fixed phase, autodetected [default]
                          block        per-block phase, autodetected
                          0   or 'a'   force fixed 0-degree phase
                          90  or 'b'   force fixed 90-degree phase
                          180 or 'c'   force fixed 180-degree phase
                          270 or 'd'   force fixed 270-degree phase
  --phase-det <m>       force phase detection scheme for -p auto/block
                        (the default is to match the sync method);
                        <m> may be either:
                          pll     use PLL phase detection method [default]
                          walk    use walk phase detection method

General processing options:
  --scale-hf-pwr <x.x>  2400 Hz power scaling factor (0.4 -> 3.5)
  --force-shift <s>     force shift in smps (-2 -> 2, cannot use with -s freq)

Error-correction options:
  --no-default-odd-fix  don't fix odd runs by insert (PLL) or constraint (freq)
                          (not with -s walk)
  -e <policy>           fix adjacent odd-run pairs by atom flipping
                        <policy> may be one of the following:
                          singleton, confidence, zero, one, early, late.

Diagnostic options:
  --inspect-dir <dir>   save intermediate data as WAV files to directory

Other options:
  -q                    quieter; suppress progress updates
  -v                    verbose (extra warnings)
  -h                    show this help text
if your not having much joy you could upload the wave file somewhere and we could have a look at it to see what the problem is.
Regards Peter.
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Re: Quick Question: whats the best way to turn a wave recording into a BBC Tape and/or extract the files from it?

Post by shawty »

Thanks... off out soon, but I'll give that a another try asap.

cheers
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Re: Quick Question: whats the best way to turn a wave recording into a BBC Tape and/or extract the files from it?

Post by shawty »

Win 10 x64, 22H2
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