Here's Applesauce's author's description, FWIW:
> At the lowest level, they are all capturing the amount of time between magnetic flux transitions on the media. The real differentiator comes from what you do with all of these flux timings.
A more authentic representation of the flux on the disk could be made by amplifying and sampling the analog waveform straight off the drive heads. A variety of signal processing functions could be applied to that waveform vs. what the electronics on the drive will do.
And not only in a meaningless "not as accurate" sense -- the drive loses exactly the information that's critical to implementing a working copy. That's why you have to sample a track multiple times for the benefit of downstream analysis/RE tools, and why a naive capture can't be written back to a disk to get the same results.
It's not a good situation. A driver reader that *could* measure the actual flux transitions wouldn't have these problems, but we don't have such a device yet.
My point was that a true capture is/should-be possible, but not with the hardware as implemented by Greaseweazel et. al.
>Is there something you're confused about regarding floppy drives?
after reading all of that, i'm so confused i no longer even know what a floppy drive is or what it was meant to do