Hi folks!

I needed a tool for saving old tapes and albums into digital format.
As you can get many old albums on CD, and as many old tape recordings are not
very useful to listen anymore, I decided not to save them in highest quality.

A way better would be an automated processing, where I can simply play one
tape after another to get them copied into the digital world without
listening to them too much.

Therefore I wrote catdsp. It triggers recording after a noise
threshold is reached. It autoadjusts the input level and it detects gaps
between tracks.

CATDSP runs under LINUX. It can be compiled using gcc. Simply type
> gcc -Wall -O2 -o catdsp catdsp.c
to compile the source code. There should be no problems.

>catdsp --help
will then provide you with the available options for using catdsp.

I decided to release CATDSP under GNU GPL, so that you can use it for free.
Please remember that I wrote CATDSP to get rid of my old tapes, and not to
fit any other purposes. If it works for you, I would be pleased; if not,
then you should consider switching to another tool...
Anyway, feel free to contact me (except for junk or spam mail).

Because to keep it simple, no noise reduction or scratch detection has been
added to CATDSP. If you need to improve the quality of the recordings, there
should be many tools available.

A reasonable good choice for the new digital format of old recordings is
ogg-vorbis, because it is free to use, has variable bitrate by default and
provides good quality even for low bitrates.

Together with a script which loops encoding the tracks, catdsp and
oggenc will work as a realtime application. You can even work normally (if
you do not stress external devices too much) while recording your
input source :-)


Have fun,
Thorsten Reinecke
reinecke@thorstenreinecke.de