Date   : Fri, 22 Jul 2005 01:54:31 +0100
From   : jgh@... (Jonathan Graham Harston)
Subject: Re: floppy discs

Pete Turnbull <pete@...> wrote:
> On Jul 20 2005,  1:23, Jonathan Graham Harston wrote:
> > the Spectrum knowing the difference. Several people have produces
> > floppy and hard drive add-ons for the Spectrum that let you load
> > and save .TAP files directly. A lot of them also allow the
> 
> But you're not using it directly, you're using some software to to
> encode raw data into audio again, and you need a computer to do it.
 
No.... I'm using some software that passes raw data from a storage
medium to the Spectrum. No "into audio" at any stage, unless you
like thinking about the magnetic field changes in the disk read
head as being "audio".
 
In fact, you could say that *all* magnetic storage media use
software (and hardware) to encode raw data into what would look
just like an audio signal to an audio recorder.
 
And, .TAP tapefiles are nothing to do with the audio signals
recorded onto tape. The contain the *byte data* that is those
audio signals on tape represent, in the same way that a disk image
contains the *byte data* of what the magnetic flux changes on the
disk surfacre represent.
 
> An MP3 is digitised audio, and you can carry an MP3 player around in
> your pocket.  We could argue about the difference between raw binary
> data being encoded to audio and a digitised audio stream that's decoded
> from storage, but to me there's a difference in kind, and portability.
 
It all depends on what you want to store. Just the byte content of
the data at one extreme, or everything down the time of and the
type of magnetic flux changes on the recording medium.
 
-- 
J.G.Harston - jgh@...                - mdfs.net/User/JGH
HADFS System Resources - http://mdfs.net/Software/HADFS