Re: Speech Input/Output on Apple II

["Michael J. Mahon" <mjmahon@aol.com>]

nexus6gs wrote:

<snip>

> I used "The Voice" in the early eights for sampling audio via the mic
> input on a cassette player with the headphone output going into the
> cassette in on my Apple II+. Single Bit with 64K ram I had about 8
> seconds of space left to sample into after "The Voice" was loaded.

Since anything more than 8000 samples per second is overkill for
1-bit audio, and since 8 samples fit in a byte, one second of audio
will fit in 1KB.  Run length compression can be used in many cases
to reduce storage requirements even further.

And since the actual sampling routine is under 50 bytes, essentially
all of the available memory can be used to store sound.

> Voice quality was/is that of CB radio.

Actually, 1-bit audio is substantially worse than most CB radios.
A better comparison would be a heavily clipped amateur radio
transmitter--many hams will clip (limit) hard to get more audio
power into the signal, and ham operators learn to understand it
reasonably well.  Of course, the cliched phrases of ham radio
add a lot of redundancy, too.  ;-)

-michael

Music synthesis for 8-bit Apple II's!
Home page:  http://members.aol.com/MJMahon/

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