#Tapedeck mac mod

If you prefer other routes to pitch shifting shenanigans, check out this project. The 8 steps of the sequence can be manually set with the rotary control, and in future, even plans to add a real MIDI input, allowing the system to act as a monophonic synth. The natural thing to do next was to put in a tape with a looping sample at a set pitch, and then vary it in a sequence controlled by the Pico.

With a bit of work, was also able to create a function that converted MIDI note values into PWM values that determine various motor speeds. These allow various patches or scripts to be run on the Pico, controlling the motor speed of the tape player in various ways. With that sorted out, the project was fleshed out with an OLED screen and a rotary encoder. This allows accurate control of motor speed, and thus pitch. This is achieved with the use of an NPN transistor driven by the PWM output of the Pico. The build uses a Raspberry Pi Pico, which employs PWM to control the speed of the tape drive’s motor.

#Tapedeck mac mod

decided to take advantage of this, executing a fancy digitally-controlled pitch mod on his Tascam Porta 02 tape deck. The cool thing about magnetic tape is that by varying the speed at which you play it back, you can vary the pitch of the output. Video after the break.Ĭontinue reading “Simple Universal Modem Helps Save And Load Data From Tape” → Posted in Misc Hacks Tagged audio, modem, tape, tape deck, tape storage There really were some weird ways of storing data way back when. even goes as far as demonstrating its use with an old reel-to-reel deck in a helpful YouTube video. If you find yourself trying to recover old data off tapes, or writing to them for a retrocomputing project, this build might be just what you need. On the demodulation side, it’s got an LM393 comparator which can read data on tape and spit out a clean square wave for easy decoding by digital circuitry. Rather than just spitting out rough square waves, it modulates them into nice smooth sine waves with fewer harmonics. On the modulation side of things, it’s designed to be as analog-friendly as possible. This build should work fairly well on all of them! It doesn’t matter whether you want to store data on a digital voice recorder, a cassette deck, or an old reel-to-reel. It’s “universal” because has designed it to be as format-agnostic as possible. The project consists of a circuit for modulating data into audio, and demodulating audio back into data. The Simple Universal Modem from is built to work in a similar way, turning data into audio and vice versa. Even better, those tapes would make an almighty racket if you played them on a stereo, because the data was stored in an audio format. Back in the early days of the home computer revolution, data was commonly saved on tape.