Cassette Tape Archive | Hacker News Reader

Cassette Tape Archive

tapedeck.org

132 pointsbookofjoe15 comments

Oh man! The nostalgic feeling seeing these photos give me cannot be put into words, esp. for those who haven’t used tapes. There were stores in my country where you would give a list of songs you wanted, select the quality of the cassette tape, and in 3-4 days would get the recordings, a primitive Spotify list. I also had a combination radio/cassette player deck on which, whenever a good song on the radio came up, I would record it, to have my own mix tapes.

Recently I found, to my amazement and delight, that a robust cassette hacking culture still exists to circuit bend walkmans and create loops, eg see this course: https://dogbotic.com/cassette-hacking or the HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13386973.

Tangential, but I’ve also started to at 8-track tapes. You can pick these up really cheap at estate sales and players are cheap, too.

> I also had a combination radio/cassette player deck on which, whenever a good song on the radio came up, I would record it, to have my own mix tapes.

Ha I did this too, starting from when I was pretty young. I had a dual-deck recorder, and would sometimes just record the radio for an hour or so, then later copy specific songs to a second tape. I remember getting so annoyed when the radio announcers would talk over the beginning/ending of a song I wanted.

Eventually I started buying music on CDs but still made mix tapes for years after that, because (1) I initially didn't have a portable CD player, but I had a walkman, (2) even once I did, I still usually preferred listening to a mix vs a single album, and (3) I didn't get a CD burner until their price became reasonable.

Related: https://c-90.org/

I think this was my first one (a gift from dad): https://c-90.org/catalogue/tapes/Sony/Sony%20EF/0

They look familiar but I can't tell if I can draw any by heart. There were so many brands to make one iconic design. Maybe TDK is the winner. I can only guess that beige colored ones are related to lessons or courses.

Seeing the BASF cassette immediately reminded me their advertisement:

https://youtu.be/CD6S8DZHpG4

And this one, for Maxell: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zk71h2CQ_xM

I got into tape trading of live shows just before CD writers became widespread - I still have a tape deck and literal crates packed with Maxell XL-IIs tapes.

Good times. Of course, nowadays I find most shows online - but I miss the whole social structure of organizing tape trees, trading for blanks and postage, branching into taping local gigs (using an incredibly tiny Sony PCM-M1 DAT deck - walkman size!)...

Very good times indeed!

https://imgur.com/xemkxD8 “Longest cassette tape: 12 hours per side”!!! Holy cow that must be thin.

I need to dig out one of my Boots C15 tapes for them, the tape of choice for ZX Spectrum "development"

Very cool! I still have my Zaxxon cassette from the Atari 8-bit to wax nostalgic.

I wish i could hear how they sound. Each tape has its own hiss and flutter.

I love this.

THis is fn beautiful.

We need a PI Zero/pico inside one of these with an SSD and a tiny servo that spins the tape and writes with tape-head (from the CD-Cassette-dongles) it does a continuous bitstream backup of audio captured on the tape-reel=real-time - but then can be played back as any regular cassette

Incredible collection of photos - I like this:

https://i.imgur.com/xemkxD8.png

Might be cheaper than deadstock tapes of decent quality, not recently manufactured ‘type 0’ tapes.

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