Re: [microsound] Reading the HD as sound?

[alex <alex@xxxxxxxx>]

On Sun, 2006-12-10 at 15:30 +0000, Martin . wrote:
> Does anyone know if there has been made a program (or object/patch/code)
> that can read from one specified point on the HD to another and interpret it
> as a soundfile without it necessarily being a soundfile?
> 
> I know it's possible to interpret any file as a soundfile in many ways but
> the issue here would probably be to refer to a physical point on the HD and
> not the file structure.

Under unix there is "dd", for example to listen to the scsi hard drive
"sda" run this as root:

  dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/audio

you can then add skip and count to listen to particular blocks from the
disk.  To save as something like a wav you would have to pipe into an
audiofile conversion program such as sox.  For example the following
would save the 500 blocks after the millionth block as out.wav

  dd if=/dev/sda skip=100000 count=500 | sox -s -w -r 22000 -t raw - out.wav

Be careful though, getting the options round the wrong way will write
data from your microphone to your hard drive.

More info:
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dd_(Unix)
  http://sox.sourceforge.net/


alex



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