Digitizing audio cassettes and extracting the contents of digital cartridges.

[Linux for blind general discussion]

Ok, I know that there is a kind of cable that works with those digital 
cartridges.  I guess that the drives just have a regular file system on 
them.  The NLS digital book player is linux based and there should be no 
reason for the file system to be different.


The files on there are .3gp files so you would have to have a program 
that could play them.  Just download a book from bard and look at the 
kinds of files in that zip archive.  If you want to test it, just unpack 
the book in a dedicated folder on your machine and try to see if 
anything other than protected.mp3 will play.


I have heard that there is some kind of encryption on these files but I 
am not sure how simple it would be to crack if, indeed, it is there.  
You can download the zip archive of the latest firmware from the bard 
website and see if you can get it running on your computer.  If so, 
problem solved.


In the case of those cassettes, there is no way that I am familiar with 
to get them on digital without using the full runtime of the source.  
This is a bummer and a time consumer, but I have done some of them for 
my parents and for my girlfriend, and I just recorded them with 
something like sox or ecasound and let it go at that.




Hope this helps.




Doug Smith