[time-nuts] Time Code generator

[jimlux]

paul swed wrote:
> I have used nematime over the years it does indeed work well.
> I have not checked mine was win98 and I used it on an old laptop.
> But it worked very well. Think I was using it for IRIG B which is an
> excellant timecode for recording on an audio track.
>

I think it kind of depends on what's going to "ingest" the recording later.

In the lab world I'm in, IRIG and NTP (as well as 1pps/10MHz) are 
natural choices.

However, if you wanted to do some processing with, say, matlab or 
octave, it might be nice to have something where you could take a .wav 
or .mp3 or similar file, load it in, and then have a utility that could 
"time tag" the samples (i.e. say you had two channels of audio samples, 
and after processing, you'd have 1 channel of audio samples and 1 column 
vector of "time")

Or, given that there are lots of inexpensive high quality digital 
multichannel recorders out there, something where you could feed your 
timecode into one channel of the recorder, and record whatever you want 
on the other 3,7, etc channels. Dump it out in whatever the native 
format of the recorder is, and load it into matlab,c, whathaveyou.

Some of the digital recorders do timestamp the files in some way, but it 
seems that it's always in some form that is convenient for audio/video 
editing packages or media players.  I've not found (I haven't spent huge 
time looking) a matlab or c ingest program that takes a "media player 
target" file and generates raw samples for manipulation.

I've got some iPhone/iPad apps that do things like record the 
accelerometer data and will email you an excel spreadsheet with the GPS 
(including time) and accelerometer readings.   While that's not exactly 
my preferred data format nor my preferred way to get the data out, it's 
not bad.