Tapedeck.org
tapedeck.org
tapedeck.org
Anyway, this is a cool project. I mostly used tape as a little kid until the price of DiscMans became cheap enough my mom would let me have one in the car for road trips, but it’s cool to see how many options there were.
I still have one weird piece of disco music that I've never been able to tie to a particular artist, pretty good mystery that one. I managed to recover it from the tape after not playing it for decades.
I tried this myself a couple of times in the past without success, but the one I made recently is of sufficient quality to generate a match.
Edit: heh, found your twitter: https://twitter.com/NoChameIeon/status/1426999239599611911
It's this song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-mcSVj0Vew
So, one mystery solved, and one memory of a good friend restored.
Playing it loud on an average, bass boosted bluetooth speaker box (almost to the point of distortion) and letting my phone's crappy microphone pick up the song... Did.
Given that the song detecting apps expect to pick up songs people play by sticking their phone in the air, I would not be surprised if a signal could also be _too high_ of a quality for a match.
I would also try the TranceAddict forums which have 20 year old section on identifying tracks.
Most of my mysteries have been solved now due to these technologies and internet fora.
I had to decribe the concept of analogue/ digital, A2D process, error rate, even the home computers of the 80's. all this whilst completely and utterly drunk
the conversation latest for ages - no idea whether he fully understood or if I was talking rubbish.
But it it made me realise how much life has changed
The micro could do 1200 bauds/s, so 150 bytes/s. In 7 minutes you'd load almost 64KB (no game was ever that big).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escape_from_the_Mindmaster
I haven’t seen that cover art in decades wow. Still frightens me now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D-VHS - 50 gigs
also some standards worked with normal tapes:
Tape is still widely used for backup, it’s not quite dead.
Note that, in spite of the recording media (S-VHS, IIRC, not D-VHS) used, these drives were rugged, expensive, rack-mount devices and were never marketed as consumer products.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADAT
Apparently that was about 1.8 GB of data. Cassette tapes were also common in early computers:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_Datasette
Apparently in the "Turbo-Tape" iteration, they could store about 2 MB.
I noticed however that switching between bits produced a "ringing artifact" oscillating at about 60 kHz. If this is caused by my particular setup I don't know. With a better modulation than just PCM this could be compensated and you could pull probably more data out of the stream.
It triggers my memories of scanning for songs, using toothpicks to extract broken tapes from car dashboards, and spending afternoons rewinding loose tape back into cassettes. Cassettes (8-tracks included) were a horrible bridge technology between vinyl and CDs. I'm glad people can find joy in their external appearance. That is their only redeeming quality.
But for those who lean that way, there’s a store in Tokyo that is ready to serve you:
Personally, I can no longer tell the difference between digital media and a high-quality cassette recording of it. That's probably due to age though...
Now I need to see if I can dig up any of the 10 minute ones that were used in an office I worked in to send little voice memos around before they moved to a digital system.
After not having actively listened to a tape for twenty years, I was recently exposed and really surprised by how good the sound was. With some half-decent tapes and a half-decent deck, I was struggling to make out the difference between cassette and CD during A/B testing.
SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS
Interestingly, my old cassettes have not degraded over the decades at all, while the VHS tapes certainly did.
There are a lot of reasons why you might hear the hiss in one system and not another... besides different tape types, there are systems like Dolby noise reduction. The noise reduction comes in different varieties and must be paired with the correct decoding circuitry... if the wrong type of noise reduction is selected at playback, it may sound noticeably worse. I'm sure you know this, but plenty of people on HN are too young.
Most compact cassettes used Dolby B. You could use newer systems like Dolby C or Dolby S instead, and it would get rid of most of the hiss. These weren't used much when cassettes were common because tapes made with Dolby C or S sounded horrible without decoding, and Dolby S also came out very late when cassettes were on the way out.
If you combine all of these things... a tape deck with a narrower head gap, with a high-quality CrO2 or metal tape, and Dolby S noise reduction, you will get something that sounds very good, like a CD.
This video has some samples with and without Dolby S, with type I and type II tapes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfgJFvHPLfc
If you were using compact cassettes for music production, like with a Tascam Portastudio, the situation was even better, since it ran the tapes at a higher speed.
Weirdly, I never minded the rumble and crackling of vinyl.
I remember the first time I listened to a CD. The song ended, and there was silence. Dead silence. It was like the song faded away and sucked me in :-)
I'm sorry. I don't doubt you're right, with spending enough money on the cassettes and cassette player you can get decent results, but that just wasn't what mainstream cassettes and players were like. I've long since replaced my cassettes with CDs and threw them out. There's no nostalgia for them for me.
Not trying to convince anyone to use cassettes, there are enough reasons to avoid them. But it is worth explaining that you can get very high-quality sound from them.
And for an encore, 2" AMPEX :)
That might be a bit costly with shipping.
They're more likely to have trademark issues with the T-shirt business. A consumer might reasonably assume a t-shirt with an image of a Sony cassette tape on it was made by Sony. Maybe they were careful in their selection of which tapes are on t-shirts on their own, the links to the actual store (on a German site) don't work for me.