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Magnetic stripe Card Utility

MCU (short for Magnetic stripe Card Utility)is a software for reading
and decoding signals from an ultra-simple magnetic stripe card reader
described in the 2600 magazine Volume 22, issue #1,in the article called
“Magnetic Stripe Reading” on the page 28. This article is also republished
at http://sephail.net/articles/magstripe/ .

Technically, the application binds the RTAudio library, needed for
platform-independent audio I/O, with the routines from dab.c/dmsb.c
files from the aforementioned article. The software is written in C++,
as it is needed by RtAudio.

Compiling

Currently the program is trimmed to compile on Win* platform. Linux users
may either work with the original dab.c/dmsb.c sources or make MCU compile
under Linux (or any other UNIX) too.

Prerequisites:

0. Cygwin with MinGW compiler

Steps:

1. Get RtAudio library and unpack it into the directory with MCU sources

2. Move the Makefile_RtAudio into the RtAudio-*/tests directory

2.1/2. If needed, choose MinGW compiler as the default one with

/usr/sbin/alternatives --config gcc

3. Go to the RtAudio-*/tests and compile the RtAudio library with

make -f Makefile_RtAudio

4. Go back to the directory with MCU sources and type

make

And voila, you have the executable. Run it with

./mcu -h

to get acquainted with possible options.

TODO

• Integrate libsndfile for decoding files recorded previously

• Implement other bitstream decoders

Miscellaneous

This software was used in the project MetroChange (WaybackMachine).