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recycling HDD

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Of course a hard drive records one's and zero's. To record analog without the compression of MP3, you feed the audio to a A to D converter.
A D to A converter plays it back. Pauses in the sound will waste a huge amount of memory.
 
Thank you for your reply Audioguru,
but you may have mis-read the question:

Is it possible to record analogue (audio) on to a hard drive ?
It doesn't have to be noughts and ones surely ?

I would have thought a magnetic recording head could record an
analogue signal.

John :)
 
Hi John
It would be a nightmare to redesign the electronics of a hard drive to make it into a "cassette recorder".
 
Yes, it's essentially building your own harddrive, although you would at least have the advantage of the mechanics being ready built!.

But why would you want to record analogue on a harddrive anyway?.
 
Hi Audioguru, Hi Nigel,

Oh, i don't want to do it.
I was trying to think of the easiest way to use an old hard drive to
play music.
Using it as a form of cassette player would not be easy, but it would
probably be easier than building a dedicated MP3 system to do it.
Although there are lots of things i dont know about hard drives.

It may not be possible to have the head(s) move evenly across the
unit, they may only move in little jerks, this i don't know.

I don't know how long you could get in minutes by using it in such
a wasteful way, but you could switch between heads, like changing
tracks on an 8-track.

And the heads are quite tiny, they would certainly need a bit of a
pre-amp.

Just contemplating possibilities ....

John :)
 
john1 said:
Oh, i don't want to do it.
I was trying to think of the easiest way to use an old hard drive to
play music.
Using it as a form of cassette player would not be easy, but it would
probably be easier than building a dedicated MP3 system to do it.
Although there are lots of things i dont know about hard drives.

It would be far simpler to record and play back the audio digitally, as the drive is already designed to do, there are plenty of existing systems that already do this - multi-track hard disk recorders for recording studios.

I would suggest building one of those would be greatly simpler than converting a harddrive to record analogue directly?.

But you also seem to have changed your requirements?, going from MP3 to plain audio?, MP3 is far harder because of the compression and de-compression used, although you can buy MP3 decoder chips - hence the numbers of designs on the Internet for MP3 players.
 
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