>Does anyone have a PD tape copy program that is multi-buffered?
>The standard tcopy reads and then writes and of course this causes
>the streaming tape to not stream slowing it down and resulting in
>extra wear.
>I checked out and found something called tape_copy which seems to
>do the same thing. Also something called "buffer" wich is multi-buffered
>but doesn't have any provision for automatically preserving the source
>tapes record and file structure.
I wrote one but it is "write-only" and uses sysV-style shared memory
so it isn't too portable. Unlike the others I've seen, it knows
when the input data isn't keeping the tape streaming (well, it
guesses...) and lets the buffer fill completely before restarting
to reduce the start-stop action, and it can be told to fill a
huge non-shared buffer on these occasions which works nicely when
you are dribbling stuff in over a slow network link. Hmmm, I
guess it doesn't automatically detect the input block size either
so maybe it's not quite what you want, but if anyone is interested
I'll dig out the source.
Les Mikesell
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