I am quite jealous of this GUI, I must admit. I went the Unix-philosophy route of having distinct tools for different parts of the process. Quadbike doesn't attempt to decode serial frames -- it just outputs a list of tones, which it is then the job of some other tool to deal with. There are definitely advantages to having the integration that you have.My converter can now load files in from WAVs and spit them out as CSW files! I find it's nice to have a GUI wrapped around it (and fun to watch it in action).
Quadbike's TIBET (text) export (-t) does provide a sample number within the WAV for each line of output, which does make it possible to locate features within the WAV file.
It does seem to be a bit temperamental for some users. It hasn't had too much testing outside of my limited use cases. There is a known bug where input WAV files need to have at least a short span of silence at the end of the file. You can create this synthetically if necessary by appending silence to the end of a recording, or muting the end of it. There is a source patch for this lurking around somewhere, but I haven't done a proper release since fixing this bug. (This is what I mean about "my limited use cases" -- I always have silence at the end of my WAVs.)Now that's all working, I should take a more in-depth look at Quadbike. I couldn't get it to work with my WAVs when I tried previously but it's far more technical than my converter so I strongly suspect I was using it incorrectly...
The documentation is perhaps a little bit lacking when it comes to actually using the software. I did try to put together a quick start guide, but I think a few practical examples of the process of dealing with stubborn tapes is probably something I should write. It's not particularly obvious how to proceed with a stubborn tape, so having a sample procedure to follow would help I think.
Regarding CSW: if you're decoding serial frames yourself anyway, it's no problem always to write a CSW with a phase of 0. This is what software (including MakeUEF) tends to expect, so the issues with CSW go away.
Statistics: Posted by Diminished — Sun Feb 09, 2025 11:42 pm