// the find
ieatlint/mslib
Library for decoding audio recordings of magnetic stripes
A C library for decoding magnetic stripe data from PCM audio recordings — you swipe a card past a microphone and this extracts the track data. Supports IATA (alphanumeric, track 1) and ABA (numeric, track 2) encoding formats. Aimed at hardware hackers and security researchers doing physical access card analysis.
Self-contained with no dependencies beyond C99 and POSIX; raw bitstream access is a smart escape hatch for non-standard encoding schemes; includes a working test harness (mstest) so you can validate against real audio files immediately; the ABA/IATA split matches the real-world card format split correctly.
Abandoned since 2011 — over 15 years without a commit, which matters for a security-adjacent tool; no build system beyond a bare Makefile, no pkg-config, no install target; documentation is described as 'terse' and the blog link is almost certainly dead; 76 stars over 15 years signals this solved a narrow problem and moved on rather than building a community around it.