Making Real Tapes From .CAS Files?

[Tempest]

Is it possible to make real cassette tapes from .CAS files? If so, would they have both tracks (music and data) or would it just be the data?

[Rybags]

http://a8cas.sourceforge.net/

 

I think there's also a standalone CAS2WAV program that's been around for some time.

For music, I don't know if any of the dedicated utilities have facility to merge an audio track. It could easily enough be done using Audacity or countless other audio utilities.

[Kr0tki]

Don't use CAS2WAV. It's old and doesn't support copy-protected tapes. The a8cas-tools package, linked above, is it's modern replacement. It will convert a CAS file to WAV.

 

Alternatively, you may find Turgen System more friendly - it has a GUI and AFAIK can play a CAS file to the PC's speaker without the user having to perform an intermediate conversion to WAV, and that's way cool.

 

CAS files cannot even contain an audio track, so they tend to not be used for tapes that have audio tracks. E.g. in Farb's preservation torrent, available somewhere here, tapes with audio tracks are archived as WAVs.

Edited September 7, 2016 by Kr0tki

[k1w1]

It's amazing that no one has tried to create a .cas format that incorporates 2 channels. Is there some technical problems in doing this?

[Rybags]

Probably lack of demand. In the rare cases I have anything to do with using Cas filetypes I ensure the C: patch is active to make it run near instantly, which makes audio accompanyment pointless.

Not sure how many people bother to use C: in realtime in emulation, as far as I'm concerned it's not a memory I care to relive.

[Kr0tki]

Technical problems, no, there aren't any - it's simply a solution to a non-existing problem.

1. No significant storage size advantage. Storing audio in CAS would mean the CAS file would still be large - at the very least, as large as half of the source WAV file. In case of compressed audio files the difference would be even less pronounced. And these days storage space is not a big issue anymore.

2. Emulators can use WAV files as well as CAS files. Atari800-a8cas, in particular, treats audio files and CAS files equivalently - it loads and saves(!) recordings in WAV, FLAC, Ogg/Vorbis formats (and more), and also accelerates transmission with the SIO patch the same way as for CAS files.

[Tempest]

Bummer. Maybe I'll keep my tapes after all.

[Tempest]

I was just thinking about this again last night. Would a .wav file have both the audio and data tracks or is it simply impossible to create a copy of a tape with both?

[Kr0tki]

Yes, it would contain both tracks, just make sure to record it in stereo.

[Tempest]

Great. Are there .wav files of most tapes out there? I usually only see .cas.

[Kr0tki]

Most tapes don't contain an audio track, so there's no need to archive them as WAV, therefore they are available only as CAS. As for collections that include tapes in audio formats, there's Farb's software presentation torrent (mentioned earlier), Atariarea's Tape Preservation Project, and the tapes section at AtariWiki.