tapetransfer

Even though my good tape decks are broken at the moment I have started on the software to transfer my techno and house mix tapes to the computer.

I have written the software before in C++. It basically waits for a sound on the input and then writes the music to a file until it notices a long quiet section at the end of the tape and stops writing. The software was using threads and used the lame lib to do on the fly mp3 encoding, to make it even quicker to digitize tape. It also notified the user of any buffer underflows and clipped samples.

This software is more than five years old now and all the libraries have changed and I can't be bothered to fix it all.

As I want to learn python anyway I decided to rewrite it in python and see how good I can make it.

Documentation for the (multiple) alsa bindings for python is pretty bad, so I googled around and found kissrec , which is a very simple command line audio recorder with a timer and VU meter. It is GPL, so I have started with that, but I probably rewrite the whole thing to make it (in my eyes) nicer code.

You can find the whole thing at http://tapetransfer.googlecode.com/ , but please don't look to closely - it is rather ugly at the moment.