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.
> 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.
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.
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!)...
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
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.