libmsr is a library for interacting with magnetic stripe reader/writers.

It's a fork of Jacob Appelbaum's libmsr, which has been inactive for several years and contains several incomplete and/or buggy components. This project is an attempt to deliver a more complete and programmer-friendly library.

$ git clone https://github.com/woodruffw/libmsr && cd libmsr
$ make && sudo make install

Doxygen generated documentation can be found here.

For functional examples, see the msr-utils repository.

Once installed, linking libmsr into your project is as simple as adding -lmsr to your linker flags.

libmsr currently supports the MSR-206 and all firmware-compatible reader/writers like the MSR-505(C) and maybe the MSR-605. I've only tested it with the MSR-505C.