Tap file

A Tap file encodes the series of pulses used to store data on a Commodore data cassette, capturing the cassette contents at a level of abstraction intermediate between the raw waves (as might be captured in an audio file format) and the data bytes that are stored via the cassette pulses (which might be saved into an application-specific file such as a Commodore 64 binary executable or a Commodore BASIC tokenized file).

The file contains a series of bytes giving the length of each pulse (measured as the time interval between two successive negative edges of the square wave), expressed as the number of microseconds multiplied by 0.123156, rounded to an integer value from 0 to 255.

Format documentation

 * Tap format (c64tapes.org)