[Coco] [Color Computer] Re: Fixing an old coco tape?

[Stephen H. Fischer]

Hi,

James the Animal Tamer wrote:
> Nothing's perfect.  I've been lucky in that most o' my tapes have
> been in pretty good shape.
>
> 1.  Inspect the tape.  this using your sound editor program.

> Using your sound editor program, cut your WAVs up into pieces each of
> which contains the software.
> Okay, so what can you do?
>
> a) Eyeball the waves in your sound editor.  Bad noise stands out.

If you or anyone succeeds in improving a WAV file using a  wave editor
please
tell us what you did. Wave editors are showing up bundled with CD / DVD
writers and other packages so more of us will have them and be able to help
others.

One technique that might work would be the selecting "GOOD" parts from
multiple copies thus building up one good copy.

As to "Bad noise", be careful. I was convinced that I had been sent many bad
copies of one program. I could hear on my PC with /Hi-fi/ speakers a
repeated noise on all of the recording and could clearly see the wave form
being broken up. I had not heard this sound on any of the loading of tapes
on my CoCo's during all the years of using tapes. It turned out that the
/Poor Speakers/ on my Sony TV / CoCo monitor just could not produce this
sound. The tape loaded with no problem when given to a real CoCo.

> b) Try loading each WAV into an emulator.

Better: Try loading into a *real* CoCo.

> Good luck.  I've probably spent as much time as anyone trying to
> recover old cassettes as WAV (see my emulators!  LOL!).
>
> There are some WAV to cassette image format programs for the CoCo,
> but right at the moment, I don't remember where.  One of them was
> pretty good as I recall.  Might 'a' been one of Vavasour's, or
> might 'a' been one written for the Dragon.  I don't remember, and
> alas I don't have it on this computer right now.

This sounds interesting. If the source is available then some filtering
might be added in.

> --- In ColorComputer at yahoogroups.com, "James Diffendaffer"
> <jdiffendaffer at y...> wrote:
>> I have a tape of Galagon (1982) from Associates.  I recorded the
> tape
>> to a wav file but there is a lot of background noise on the tape
> and I
>> can't get the wav to load in the emulator.
>>
>> Are there any utilities designed to clean up emulator wav files so
>> they will load better?

If it has not been tried to be loaded on a *Real* CoCo, send a copy to me or
someone else. A lot of time might be saved this way. As I said before, bad
sounding weird looking waves might be OK on a *real* CoCo. The filtering
might be best there. A combination of wave shaping in the electrical world
and software shaping in the program world might be hard to understand and
duplicate.

-- 
Stephen H. Fischer <sfischer1 at mindspring.com>

P.S. Please tell me if this posting does not get to the Yahoo list and I am
incorrect that posting to the main list is all that is needed (to eliminate
dups).