Free 3m tape software for linux

Amanda is a client/server application for making remote backups. While originating from a UNIX environment, it also supports backups of windows machines (via the smbclient utility). Client software for other machines is planned. See the Amanda homepage for details.

Amanda CDRW-Taper program is a drop-in replacement for the taper component of the Amanda backup system. CDRW-Taper makes it possible to dump backups to CD-RW, DVD+RW or DVD-RW instead of tape. CDRW-Taper is licensed under the GNU general public license (version 2) (see COPYING for more information).

The original version of the CDRW-Taper simply copied the backed up data from Amandas holding disk to an intermediate directory. After the backup was finished, the CDRW-Taper program created an ISO-9660 image from the intermediate directory which was burnt on a CDRW.

After using this setup for about half a year it became clear, that CDRW media were simply too small for our purposes. While Amanda does support tape changers, the CDRW-Taper has no such equivalent.

One option was to move to a larger type of media, like DVD+R or "double density" CDRW, without changing the software. The other, at that time cheaper option was to change the software to emulate some kind of CDRW changer.

The idea is to have the taper copy the backed up data to several intermediate directories, each representing a single CDRW. After the backup is finished, these can be burnt to CDRW one by one. The changing of the media can be done manually.

The nice thing about this is that this way you can also back up to hard disk. Diskspace has become cheap, so you can have all of your backups available online, and still burn them all on removable media (to be stored in a safe place).

Meanwhile, DVD+RW have become sufficiently cheap to present an interesting alternative to the clumsy manual process involved with backups to multiple CDRW. Therefore, the current version has been extended to support backup to DVD+R/+RW and DVD-R/-RW media as well, using the dvd+rw-tools.

tape2mp3 is a collection of programs which together can help in the process of converting tapes to mp3s. After recording your wav files from tapes, tape2mp3 will scan for track boundaries and split the giant wav file into smaller ones based on periods of silence in the file.

First, record the wav file of your tape (or whatever else it is you are recording). If you have the wavtools package installed you can use record.sh, give it a filename for the output file and the length of your tape so that it knows when to stop (if you overestimate, it seems to be ok to hit ctrl-c).

Next, run tape2mp3.pl with at least -f file. The script will happily overwrite anything called [0-9]+.wav, so watch out.

This program scans for moments of silence in a wav file. These must be over a couple of seconds to be recognised (this can be changed in the trackscan source). The volume threshold for silence is also modifiable in the source. Trackscan outputs the start and end markers (in seconds) of tracks. The are parsed by process.pl which calls wavcut to split the file up. It also makes a check about short tracks and will throw away anything under a certain size (10 seconds at the moment).

Tapiir is a simple and flexible audio effects processor, inspired on the classical magnetic tape delay systems used since the early days of electro-acoustic music composition.

Tapiir project provides a graphical user interface consisting of six delay lines, or "taps", which can introduce an almost arbitrarily big or small delay to their inputs and can be feed back to each other.

A wide set of effects can be easily achieved by properly configuring and connecting the delay lines: complex echo patterns, resonances, filtering, etc. Delays, interconnections and gains can all be controlled in real time.

TAPIIR internal processing modules consist of six delay-lines, each with a mixer at its input and a gain control at its output, and a stereo output mixer. Stereo input from an external source, typically a musical instrument, is routed to all input mixers. In addition to this, the output of each delay line is also routed to the input mixers of all delay lines, including itself. Figure 1 shows the diagram of TAPIIRs internals.

This cross-feeding of audio signals throughout the system of delay-lines and mixers, allows the user to create a very large variety of stereo delay effects. Very simple echos or ping-pong effects can be achieved easily, but more complex effects such as early reflection echos, reverbs, complex rhythmic and arrhythmic patterns and even Karplus-Strong like synthesis is also possible. It is important to observe, that these more complex effects are only possible by using sample accurate processing.

This article appears in Proceedings of the COST G-6 Conference on Digital Audio Effects (DAFX-01), Limerick, Ireland, December 6-8, 2001

Sample accuracy

Conventional hardware effect processors are often rather limited in the lenght of there delay-lines. It is unusual to encounter accuracy higher than 1 msec, and even 10 msec is used frequently, and maximum delay-lenght are limited as well.

Obviously, this limitation in hardware effect processors is deliberate, both out of technical concerns or marketing. Most users are not interested in higher accuracy, and the standard user interface of hardware effects processors - buttons or at the most an alpha-dial - would make it a painful job to adjust. Also, one can imagine that lower accuracy means less computational cost, and therefore lower overall cost of the effect processing hardware.

For advanced users however, this limitation can be annoying. Of course, many of the effects obtained with very short delay times, such as reverb or filtering, are usually also implemented in the same hardware, but it can be very interesting to combine all these with longer delay-time effects; it would be necessary to use several processors connected together to do this.

The implementation of TAPIIR, however, is sample accurate. This means that extremely short delay times can be used, 0.023 msec when using a sample-rate of 44100 Hz. In addition to this fine control over delay-lengths, the sample accuracy is also implented for feedback and even cross-feeding between the various delay-lines, This is achieved by the fact that the internal processing core of TAPIIR is written in such a way, that the input and output values of the delay-lines and mixers are passed on 1 at a time, instead of buffer-by-buffer.

Filtering with delays

Obviously, the effects obtained by sample accurate processing of delay-lines go far beyond the simple echo effects. This includes the creation of FIR filters and - using feedback - IIR filters (this has been the inspiration for the name TAPIIR). In these cases, the mixer gains function as filter coefficients. This means that TAPIIR can efficiently be used for filtering, with flexible filter design. In a future version, TAPIIR could contain a pole/zero editor that automatically sets the mixer values to create the corresponding filter.

The maximum delay-length that can be achieved is only limited by the physical RAM memory of the system TAPIIR runs on. To give an example, with 32 MB of free memory, a total delay-length of more than 6 minutes can be used. While this might seem rather useless for normal effect processing, it clearly has musical applications. Several compositions have been written that make use of long delay times. Originally performed with the use of tape-delays, they could take great profit of the use of digital techniques for sound quality. The use of hard disk space with sufficient fast access would take away time limitation even more.

Delay-length control

The graphical user interface of TAPIIR allows the user to take full advantage of the delay-length accuracy, but at the same time it tries to maintain user-friendly and manageable, by offering value-sliders for larger scales as well. Delay-time can be entered in time in seconds in number of samples. Sliders control the digits of the delay-length, with an accuracy of 5 decimals. An additional feature is the use of tempo/signature. In that case, delay-length in not represented in seconds, but in beats, and the sliders control the subdivision of beats according to the signature. Obviously, in many circumstances this representation is a lot more useful, in a musical sense, than time in seconds.

Box Backup is an FREE, completely automatic on-line backup system for UNIX.
Main features:
- All backed up data is stored on the server in files on a filesystem; no tape or archive devices are used
- The server is trusted only to make files available when they are required; all data is encrypted
- A backup daemon runs on systems to be backed up, and copies encrypted data to the server when it notices changes
- Only changes within files are sent to the server, just like rsync
- Old versions of files on the server are stored as changes from the current version
- Behaves like tape -- old versions and deleted files are available
- Choice of backup behaviour, optimised for document or server backup
- Designed to be easy and cheap to run a server. Portable implementation, and RAID implemented in userland for reliability without complex server setup or expensive hardware. (optional)
Enhancements:
- The diffing algorithm was highly optimised for speed.
- Bugs were fixed. Solaris support was added.
- Portability improvements were made, including a new autoconf based build.
- Xattrs are supported on Linux and Darwin, which backs up resource forks under Mac OS X.
- Experimental features include keep-alive on long diffing operations, saving state for non-server use, a native Win32 port, and support for MinGW and MSVC under Win32.

Audio Transcriber records large audio samples, like a tape or radio broadcast, to your hard drive and splits it into tracks to be burned onto CD-R media.

The goal of Audio Transcriber is to make it easy to transfer audio tapes, LPs, or radio broadcasts to tracks on CD-R/CD-RW.

Visual Turing Machine project is a program that lets you create Turing machines with a point and click interface instead of using esoteric languages.
You can pack your complex machines into small boxes, and then reuse them as part of a bigger machine. VTM also features an infinite length tape.
Enhancements:
- New features include an n-ary set of symbols, multiple windows (MDI), a huge workspace (10000x10000 pixels) without a memory issue, the ability to edit your own machines, the ability to execute machines n times (where n is undefined), the ability to use expressions (like n+5) to execute machines, the ability to execute machines at desired speeds, statistics to see how many instructions were executed and how much tape was "used", and an easy wasy to translate the program to other languages.

Simplebackup is a cross-platform backup program. Simplebackup project reads a configuration file, then it builds a compressed file for each of your backup directories or files on your backup list, and places the compressed files into another location.
For example, this location can be a network mapped drive in Windows, an NFS mounted drive in Unix, another hard disk, an FTP server, or a tape device (Unix only). This will duplicate your information, doing the so called "backup".
Main features:
- Support for several compressed formats (rar, zip, tar, tar.Z, tar.gz, tar.bz2).
- Support for three backup modes: Full ; Incremental and Differential.
- Creates separate backup file for each backup directory or file on the backup list.
- Can read the backup list from a separated text file.
- Support for lists of files to ignore, this will allow ignoring files of any type desired. For example backup all except mp3 and ogg files.
- Support for lists of files to ignore, this will allow ignoring files of any name desired. For example backup all except the files with the name my_boss.png, secret document.doc.
- Support for size limitation on the files to backup, example only backup files up to 1 Megabyte.
- Support for single directory orders by using a special file named [ simplebackup_rejection.txt ] that is placed inside any directory of the backup.
- Allows for the selection of the compression ratio, example, you can use this feature to disable the compression during the backup of a directory that contains mp3 files, since this barely compress at all.
- Can also backup into ftp servers, and is able to use a ftp proxy server (must be in open mode). This gives you the possibility to do backups into any point on the planet across the internet, all that is required is for the remote system to have a standard ftp server.
- Under unix operating systems it can backup into tape devices.
- Also related to tape devices, it can execute any command desired before and after writing to tape, example mt -t /dev/tape0 rewind.
- Works fully unattended, so you can easily program a at/cron job (unix) or task scheduler (windows).
- Automatic backup session management.
- Can manage backup sessions using a local database file.
- Can run a script/batch file/command before the backup, example, you can use this feature to shut-down the database and free the data files for backup.
- Can run a script/batch file/command after the backup, again a example, you can use this feature to bring the database back on-line.
- Can send backup reports by e-mail (using smtp mail servers only).
- Can export the backup reports into any external program(s) or command(s).
- Logs all operations into a file that can be consulted latter.

MTX is a set of low level driver programs to control features of SCSI backup related devices such as autoloaders, tape changers, media jukeboxes, and tape drives.
MTX can also report much data, including serial numbers, maximum block sizes, and TapeAlert messages that most modern tape drives implement (to tell you the exact reason why a backup or restore failed), as well as do raw SCSI WRITE and READ commands to tape drives (not important on Linux, but important on Solaris due to the fact that the Solaris tape driver supports none of the additional features of tape drives invented after 1988).
MTX is designed to be a low level driver in a larger scripted backup solution, such as Amanda. mtx is not supposed to itself be a high level interface to the SCSI devices that it controls.
Main features:
- Will deal with LARGE media libraries (over a hundred elements).
- Supports multi-drive media changers such as the Exabyte 220 dual- drive tape library.
- Supports the invert bit for optical jukeboxes that need that in order to flip their media.
- Supports the eepos bits for libraries that need this to extend/retract their import/export tray.
- Now supports import/export elements!
- Reports volume tags (bar codes) and "alternate volume tags" (whatever those are!) for those tape libraries that support them.
- Now runs under FreeBSD and at least Solaris 8.
- Now has a man page!
- The actual SCSI manipulation has been separated out into a library, so that you can create your own "C" programs that manipulate SCSI media changers directly. (Please note: this is under GPL, so any such programs will have to be under GPL also).
Version restrictions:
- You may need to do a mt offline (or equivalent for your OS) on the tape drive to eject the tape before you can issue the mtx unload command. The Exabyte EZ-17 and 220 in particular will happily sit there snapping the robot arms claws around thin air trying to grab a tape thats not there.
- The next command does not understand the invert bit (i.e., does not recognize that for optical jukeboxes, the next of side one is to unload, invert, and reload the same disk). It always advances to the next slot instead.
- For some Linux distributions, you may need to re-compile the kernel to scan SCSI LUNs in order to detect the media changer. Check /proc/scsi/scsi to see whats going on.
- If you try to unload a tape to its source slot, and said slot is full, it will instead put the tape into the first empty slot. Unfortunately the list of empty slots is not updated between commands on the command line, so if you try to unload another drive to a full source slot during the same invocation of mtx, it will try to unload to the same (no longer empty) slot and will urp with a SCSI error.
- For big tape libraries (more than a couple dozen elements) this may set a big Allocation_Size in the SCSI command block for the REQUEST_ELEMENT_STATUS command. Some operating systems may not be able to handle this. Versions of Linux earlier than 2.2.6, in particular, may fail this request due to inability to find contiguous pages of memory for the SCSI transfer (later versions of Linux sg device do scatter-gather so that this should no longer be a problem).
- VMS and Tru64 support are probably irretrievably busted.
- This program will only use the first arm of multiple-arm robots unless the robot re-maps all arms to one element ID.
- It has been reported that this program works on Solaris 7 using the sst driver, and may work on Solaris 8 using the sgen driver. sst can be gotten from the Amanda contrib directory at http://download.sourceforge.net/amanda.
Enhancements:
- This release adds the scsieject utility.
- This utility is used to perform the SCSI operations start, stop, load, unload, lock, and unlock.
- It is primarily used with a data transfer device after loading media or before unloading media.
- Loaderinfo has been enhanced to provide more information.
- The mtx command previous has been implemented and the last command has been fixed.