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. MinGW compiler (for example: https://nuwen.net/mingw.html)

Steps

1. Get RtAudio-4.1.0 library from https://github.com/thestk/rtaudio/releases/tag/4.1.0 and unpack it into the directory with MCU sources

2. Type

make

And voilà, you have the executable. Run it with

./mcu -h

to get acquainted with the available options.

TODO

• Integrate libsndfile for decoding files recorded previously
• Implement other bitstream decoders