Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin
QRTape – Audio Playback from Paper Tape with Computer Vision (2021) (theresistornetwork.com)
17 points by austinallegro 4 hours ago | hide | past | favorite | 8 comments
 help



Cool project.

Though if you are looking at QR codes for something like this (internal, on paper), strongly consider using data matrix codes. They are more compact, same available error correction codes, and actually have a composition story rather then spaces between them.

Do to how datamatrix codes can be composed, you could probably design a code that both fills the height and does a continuous stream of codes with no horizontal white space between them, just a solid bar as per the spec.


Dolby have been doing this for years for audio on cinema film reels - literally from tiny QR-like codes between the sprocket holes on the filmstrip, with cinema-grade audio quality.

Has anyone yet made an app that lets you wave your phone around a vinyl record and capture macro video and then play the music through the phone's speaker?

In a sense this is reinventing digital sound-on-film, but without the continuous feed and with a much lower tape speed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound-on-film



Really like it. For some reason I'd insist on spectrograph instead of qr - artifacts make the medium. The fragile bizarre distortions and loss of the double digitization of analog data - you'd end up with more of an instrument than a format.

Think along these lines https://youtu.be/Z7Zb4rso82M?si=3FYaidCwwVdUhocO

Imagine being able to control where the loss happened in real time with potentiometers


The compression choice is what makes this work. OPUS at 12 kbps is good enough to not embarrass itself — ten years ago you'd have needed a much faster tape speed to get acceptable audio. The paper tape is the aesthetic, the codec is doing the real work.



Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: