How to acquire an Apple II cassette?
Antoine Vignau
22/Jan/2019
v2

What you need:
1- a cassette deck player
2- a modern computer
3- an audio cable (connect 1 and 2 together)
4- Audacity, the audio software
5- Ciderpress, the great Apple II disk image (and more) utility

The process:
I connect my cassette deck player to a Mac through a 3.5" stereo jack connector
All Dolby noise reductions must be turned off on the cassette deck player
I use Audacity to acquire in 22kHz stereo
Then, I save the Audacity project and play with the channels:
	1. the volume must be high, close to the limits before saturation. The more red is displayed, the lowest the quality.
	2. I first merge the two channels in one, export as WAV unsigned 8-bit and import with Ciderpress.
	If that is OK, then... it is OK. I zip the wav and upload to the site, if not...
	3. I unmerge the two channels, I separate both and try with the left channel, redo the process, if not... I retry with the right channel.
If none work, then I'm good for another acquisition.

If the foam inside the cassette is missing, add some (or put some paper), it is important that the tape touches the head of the player.

Note that Ciderpress allows a couple of options while importing a wav file, try those!

Note also that even if the wav file is imported by Ciderpress, it does not mean the program will run on an Apple II. Protections were already existing at that time. Consider that Basic (either Integer or Applesoft) programs will run fine, binary programs loaded at a zero page address, or in the keyboard buffer range, or multi-file images may not run fine.

Good luck,
Antoine