16

QRTape – Audio Playback from Paper Tape with Computer Vision (2021)

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.

an hour agothe-golden-one

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

2 hours agokristopolous

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.

3 hours agoenjoykaz