Binary Idea.

wurft

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Hello people from ComputerForums.org

I just had an idea and I need help,
first of all I need to say I am a noob with programming, so go easy on me.:p

I have a Teac-Tascam 22-4 reel to reel tape recorder, and I thought it would be verry interesting if i could convert text (or maby even small images) into binary, then into sound, and record it onto my tape recorder, then playing the sound back onto my pc and make it convert it back into binary/text/imges.

I don't even know if this would be possible, but anyway,
if it is I really need help making it work:eek:

Greetz from Holland.
 
It could theoretically work, but no-one's done it because the amount of error correction required would render the capacity of the tape many times less than what it can actually handle! You could do it via short bursts of different pitch, but you'd need to account for the sensitivity of the microphone picking it up, the errors on the tape and all sorts...

So yes, possible - but it'd be very slow and inefficient, and for all practical purposes pretty pointless!
 
I agree with berry120. It could definitely be possible theoretically. It is just that you will have to deal with the fact that there will likely be errors in data transfer. Perhaps a better way to do it would be to use laser light pulses rather than sound? This may be to far from your original idea though.
 
The sound you recorded must be exactly the same with the sound you generated, otherwise, the text (and most probably the binary) would be different as well. You would have to consider so many technicalities in this idea, but I think somewhere in the future this could be possible. You would just have to polish the idea a bit more, go for the technical side of it, and maybe you can actually find out.
 
Hmm... The OP didn't say he would use speakers and a microphone which would allow for the introduction of noise. Of course it's possible to do what the OP suggests, magnetic tape has been used to store data for many years. Early PCs used cassette recorders to store data. See here: Cassette_Waveforms

Another example is an old technology called Radio Teletype. When I was in the Army in 1971, I worked on equipment that was used to send teletype info (text) over a radio link. A device would convert marks and spaces (1's & 0's, hence binary) produced by the teletype into 2 different audio frequencies. These could then be transmitted by the radio to the other end where the 2 frequencies were detected and turned back into marks and spaces which caused the teletype to print out the text. It wasn't error prone but was limited to around 60 words per minute so it wasn't exactly high speed. See this Radioteletype - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 
that's called Phase Shift Keying.

it works with light/sound/ultrasound in fact anything that you can modulate at different frequencies.

if you could chose 16 significantly different sounnds/frequencies then you could store complete 4bit words of information rather than just single binary bits. (that's a more efficient use of the tape space.)
 
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