The invention relates to a magnetic stripe reader, and more particularly, to systems, devices and methods of directly extracting binary information embedded in a magnetic stripe using simple analog and digital signal processing techniques. Once information stored in the magnetic stripe is extracted as a F-2F waveform by the magnetic stripe reader, peaks, valleys and mid-level transition points between every consecutive peak and valley are detected. A peak-to-peak period and an average time are directly derived to determine whether the corresponding peak-to-peak transition is associated with a binary bit of “1” or “0”. This magnetic stripe reader spares a need for a multi-bit analog-to-digital converter (ADC) and a large memory, and thus, constitutes a simple and self-contained solution that may read out the binary information stored on the magnetic stripe with reduced power consumption and improved cost efficiency.