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Suppose I have a rather small file, containing.. a photograph of a... llama. And I am very paranoid of people copying my llama photo, so I decide to store it in something inconspicuous like a cassette tape. I trust people wouldn't be able to open my file because they would assume the cassette has music in it and if they try to listen to it, it will be some noise.

How would I be able to do this without compromising data integrity? Can I simply dump some binary data into the tape? Should I care about the speed at which I read the tape later on?

And finally, what tools in the real world would be necessary for such a project? Are there concise applications, frameworks or other tools for cassette recording that I can use, for example, in a Unix environment? Do I need to code my own tool?

Thank you!

Apollo
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1 Answers1

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Actually you can. This was a very normal way to store data for a few years in the 1980's. What you do is translate the binary image of the file into a sequence of higher and lower sounds, which you record onto the audio tape. You can read them back later and translate the sequence of frequencies into a sequence of bits.

What actually works quite well (and is much easier to implement) is to translate the nibbles of data into DTFM sounds as used on a telephone network, then read them back via DTFM recognition.

Eugen Rieck
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