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

[James the Animal Tamer]

Nothing's perfect.  I've been lucky in that most o' my tapes have 
been in pretty good shape.

1.  Inspect the tape.  Make sure its "fuzzy thing" which goes behind 
the tape, where the tape hits the playback head, is intact.  In some 
brands, humidity will cause the glue to rot which causes the fuzzy 
thing to fall off.  In other brands, silverfish like to eat the fuzzy 
thing.  If your "fuzzy thing" is not intact, you'll need to re-shell 
the tape -- carefully.

2.  Most tapes contain more than one copy of the software.  When 
making your WAVs, be sure to record the whole cassette, both sides.  
You might get a good copy out of it.

3.  The azimuth alignment (whatever that is) of your cassette player 
might not match the tape.  When doing your recording to WAVs, use 
more than one cassette player.

4.  Even though you know the tape is mono, sometimes you can get a 
less noisy copy by recording stereo.  Sometimes one "track" will be 
less noisy than the other.  Separate the tracks to mono.  You can do 
this using your sound editor program.

Using your sound editor program, cut your WAVs up into pieces each of 
which contains the software.

So eventually, you end up with a huge number of WAV versions of the 
software.  Then you just have to figure out which one(s) are good.  
The CoCo uses block checksumming in its tape file format, so you'll 
know which are bad fairly quickly.

Okay, so what can you do?

a) Eyeball the waves in your sound editor.  Bad noise stands out.

b) Try loading each WAV into an emulator.

c) Connect your PC's sound card output to your CoCo's cassette input 
(I've done this with several vintage PCs, but not the CoCo).  See 
which WAVs can be CLOADed this way.  If you get something good that 
can be CLOADed, connect your CoCo's cassette output to your PC sound 
card's input, and CSAVE from your CoCo while digitizing on your PC 
(I've done this with Aquarius and VZ200).

--

My own next step would be to "square" the waves, and then "read" them 
with Square-to-image-file converter program.

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.


--- 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?



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