I literally use them for my baby. I've got stacks of old rubbish on tape (got them for free) that's getting taped over to provide easy, tactile storage of spoken word and music. Nothing obscure is being destroyed - it's naff compilation tapes and similar shite. If they wear out then I can just dump the digital audio onto another tape.
They're easy to choose from, don't play infinitely, fairly hard-wearing, and the quality isn't bad because the tape deck I record with is a fancy direct-drive unit.
It's kinda funny recreating some old Swedish comedy stuff for her. As in, when I was little I had tapes that were either dubbed from other tapes or from records that a family member borrowed from a library in Stockholm. For my daughter I'm grabbing the audio from YouTube rather than the library abroad, but the end result is the same. Multiple levels of nostalgia and a load of tapes aren't going to landfill.
My app happened to crop the caption so I didn't even see it until I saw your comment. I wholeheartedly agree with you, but also don't like that it lead me to that negative value caption.
The part that protruded down from the cap along the side of the pen to form the "pocket clip" fit between the gear teeth and made turning easier & more reliable - you slid the cassette down the body of the pen until that part engaged the teeth. Later I came to prefer the style of pen below due to the flatter protrusion, but both worked pretty well.
I was never careful enough with them to even have thought of that. I'd get the cassette on the pen as described, then whirl it around & around in the air like a noise maker to wind the tape.
I was five, maybe six when I started fucking about with my Atari 800 - I just played games while listening to Another One Bites The Dust on vinyl repeatedly. The fact that someone took on software owner's challenges at that time when I was struggling to write my own name brings me immense joy.
Ha! By that time, my parents had sent me to "computer summer camp" as punishment for garbling my dad's work computer (IIe? IIc?) somehow. By the end of the same summer, I was champing at the byte to go back and clunk in BASIC, Hex, and Pascal for that sweet sweet post-apoc green screen hit of dopamine. Literal magic, all of it, and I knew then I wanted to be a gawdamned wizard.
(FWIW, years later, it was apparent they hadn't learnt their lesson when they forced me to join the church's Bible Quiz team wherein us teens memorized entire Gospel books for later use in a jeopardy-ish team battle royale format against other churchs' teams of hormonal malcontents & blithely saccharine tryhards.)
Oh, and said sibling is apparently about your age. They weren't as excited that I'd turned their car into a tape-fixer, but then I showed them how to launch a bucket w/ an m80, so we were square. 🤣
Japanese pencils are slightly bigger in diameter than American ones, they fit perfectly into the cassette sprocket while American ones leave enough room for the pencil to spin without spooling the tape.
Back in the early 90ies I would sometimes find smashed cassettes on the ground with the tape floating in the wind, while coming back from school. I'd grab the tape and splice it into another cassette so that I could hear what was on it.
I've never found anything more than boring music but the act of "repairing" the tape made me feel like a spy.
Not that it really matters. Much like those idiotic FBI warnings on media. I'm in the UK and seeing them annoys me no end. The pirated stuff doesn't have the warning! I bought it! Fuck off! Also you have no jurisdiction, you arrogant twats.
ruled that the making of individual copies of complete television shows for purposes of time shifting does not constitute copyright infringement, but can instead be defended as fair use
This is video recording of broadcast media, but is the same idea as audio recording broadcast media.
My sister had a cassette player with built in TV. We later found you could record shows by linking the RCA out to the cassette line in, and do the reverse for playback...however the volume of the casette controlled how large the image would be on the screen, so a bit tricky for playback
That cartoon has a glaring error: cassette tapes did not perform the pencil surgery on each other. Humans performed the pencil surgery on the cassette tapes.
Do you realistically think someone commenting on the Fediverse about media would seriously consider audio cassettes, one of the most popular media formats of the twentieth century, to be an obscure format?
Casettes were still well in use into the ‘90s. CDs were expensive, and unless you bought a new car or had an aftermarket CD player installed, CD players were not likely in your car. I didn’t have a factory cd player installed in a car until 2004. Before that it was a portable player with a cassette adapter.
So a 40yo would have a good shot at getting this joke. A 50yo should have no excuse.
Indeed, it would have been a lot funnier without the caption.
Just for you:
Fixed that empty space at the bottom
Yeah, no idea where that came from. It's not in the image I cropped, so maybe it's Summit? Thanks, though!
I thought you did it intentionally like the photoshop request meme, it was a bit funny
I had to lol...I lifted it off masto, not giving a fuck about the caption, yet it's consumed the comments...
It's what they call "engagement bait". Generally assists in boosting low-effort content.
Huh. That stupid caption really did make it funnier somehow.
As if cassette tapes were some obscure niche and not a major media format for years
Those of us who used them ain't dead yet!
I'm young enough that CDs had taken over by the time I was born, but my parents still used their massive cassette collection for about a decade.
So this should be familiar to people born after cassette's prime time
I literally use them for my baby. I've got stacks of old rubbish on tape (got them for free) that's getting taped over to provide easy, tactile storage of spoken word and music. Nothing obscure is being destroyed - it's naff compilation tapes and similar shite. If they wear out then I can just dump the digital audio onto another tape.
They're easy to choose from, don't play infinitely, fairly hard-wearing, and the quality isn't bad because the tape deck I record with is a fancy direct-drive unit.
It's kinda funny recreating some old Swedish comedy stuff for her. As in, when I was little I had tapes that were either dubbed from other tapes or from records that a family member borrowed from a library in Stockholm. For my daughter I'm grabbing the audio from YouTube rather than the library abroad, but the end result is the same. Multiple levels of nostalgia and a load of tapes aren't going to landfill.
Reeks of insecurity
your name gave me a chuckle
I aim to please
My app happened to crop the caption so I didn't even see it until I saw your comment. I wholeheartedly agree with you, but also don't like that it lead me to that negative value caption.
Tl;dr your comment has neutral value 😀
An old person with low self-esteem wrote that caption.
What in the boomer shit is this caption?
It's just gatekeeping for Muppets.
Bic pens were better because their caps were shaped perfectly for the job.
I dont know which cap you had but it was the worst idea because my caps were round and unsuitable for that. I used the pen itself.
The part that protruded down from the cap along the side of the pen to form the "pocket clip" fit between the gear teeth and made turning easier & more reliable - you slid the cassette down the body of the pen until that part engaged the teeth. Later I came to prefer the style of pen below due to the flatter protrusion, but both worked pretty well.
IIRC, using two yielded the best results, as one wound while the second stabilized the other spool. 🤓
I was never careful enough with them to even have thought of that. I'd get the cassette on the pen as described, then whirl it around & around in the air like a noise maker to wind the tape.
ohmygods. You absolute monster. 🤢😵💫😭😬
It was way faster.
The humanity. 🥹
fuckin' hell bro, that's some PhD shit
The Gordon Freeman of the taking up cassette slack world
(I'm taking the piss, but man this would have halved the time it took to spool back up my old Atari tapes)
You would've loved the gadget that pre-teen me epoxied together from a pen body+cap and a sibling's pullback racecar mechanism.
Wind up the bot, hold the 2nd pen & cassette, and let'er zip that tape back up to cherry new. Tubular. 🤘🏼
Good on you friend, yeeehaa!
I was five, maybe six when I started fucking about with my Atari 800 - I just played games while listening to Another One Bites The Dust on vinyl repeatedly. The fact that someone took on software owner's challenges at that time when I was struggling to write my own name brings me immense joy.
Good on you dude!
Ha! By that time, my parents had sent me to "computer summer camp" as punishment for garbling my dad's work computer (IIe? IIc?) somehow. By the end of the same summer, I was champing at the byte to go back and clunk in BASIC, Hex, and Pascal for that sweet sweet post-apoc green screen hit of dopamine. Literal magic, all of it, and I knew then I wanted to be a gawdamned wizard.
(FWIW, years later, it was apparent they hadn't learnt their lesson when they forced me to join the church's Bible Quiz team wherein us teens memorized entire Gospel books for later use in a jeopardy-ish team battle royale format against other churchs' teams of hormonal malcontents & blithely saccharine tryhards.)
Oh, and said sibling is apparently about your age. They weren't as excited that I'd turned their car into a tape-fixer, but then I showed them how to launch a bucket w/ an m80, so we were square. 🤣
Japanese pencils are slightly bigger in diameter than American ones, they fit perfectly into the cassette sprocket while American ones leave enough room for the pencil to spin without spooling the tape.
Philips designed the compact cassette specifically to be wound by a Bic pen.
Lol chill, we millennials aren't that old.
Back in the early 90ies I would sometimes find smashed cassettes on the ground with the tape floating in the wind, while coming back from school. I'd grab the tape and splice it into another cassette so that I could hear what was on it.
I've never found anything more than boring music but the act of "repairing" the tape made me feel like a spy.
Yeah it sounded like boring music if you played it forwards. You had to play it backwards to get the awesome messages from Satan.
Same, but for me, it wasn't in the early 90s.
Also, I discovered some totally amazing music this way that still haunts me to this day.
My first acy of piracy, tho I did not know it at the time, was recording songs from the radio to blank cassettes.
That wasn’t piracy. That was fair use.
I don't think that's how Fair Use works....by which I mean, it's not.Not that it really matters. Much like those idiotic FBI warnings on media. I'm in the UK and seeing them annoys me no end. The pirated stuff doesn't have the warning! I bought it! Fuck off! Also you have no jurisdiction, you arrogant twats.
https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Corp._of_America_v._Universal_City_Studios%2C_Inc.
This is video recording of broadcast media, but is the same idea as audio recording broadcast media.
I stand corrected!
I was aware of the ruling but not of the fair use defence.
If only we could steal cars that way.
You wouldn't...
I heard there were also pirate broadcasts of ZX Spectrum computer tapes.
My sister had a cassette player with built in TV. We later found you could record shows by linking the RCA out to the cassette line in, and do the reverse for playback...however the volume of the casette controlled how large the image would be on the screen, so a bit tricky for playback
Ignorance is not innocence, we are coming for you.
Just so long as nobody gets pregnant - I sure wouldn't want to have to explain how that happened from doing some old school music piracy.
Lol, how old do you think this is? Only people under 30 likely won't get it.
...there are dozens of us!
Most of us are probably over 30.
There will be so many tiktok equivalents of this. Like 67 but haven’t made it to general public
I'm late 20s and I get it. It's not that old knowledge
I'm so old I remember the music industry trying to ban the sale of blank cassettes because of copyright infringement. Oh how we laughed at them.
C30, C60, C90 GO!
That cartoon has a glaring error: cassette tapes did not perform the pencil surgery on each other. Humans performed the pencil surgery on the cassette tapes.
Notice how only some of them have arms? Clearly AI generated.
Whoa you're right, this isn't real 😳 I've been fooled again!
But doctor, those are my eyes.
Cassette tapes were such an obscure format.
That's meant to be a joke, right?
Do you realistically think someone commenting on the Fediverse about media would seriously consider audio cassettes, one of the most popular media formats of the twentieth century, to be an obscure format?
I mean, I've seen dumber. So, yes?
If I actually thought they were obscure it seems unlikely I would have known the name of the format.
Just having a goof out here but, yes, it is possible to know the name of obscure things.
Possible but not probable in this context.
You forget your audience
I could do it with my finger, no pens/pencils needed.
The pens/pencils were more often used for manual rewinding to save battery life than getting the tape back into the cassette.
"Doctor, will I ever be able to play the piano again?"
No, you're missing a finger on each hand.
ouch, my back
For extreme emergencies..."Grab the Scotch Tape!".
I had a tape splicer at one time. So basically trauma surgery.
Oh god...
explanation for the 7,999,999,997 people?
If the tape got pulled out, a pencil fit right into the hole with gears on it so you could twist just one side to roll it back up until tight.
Tell me you are 60+yo without telling me your age.
Yeah, no…
Casettes were still well in use into the ‘90s. CDs were expensive, and unless you bought a new car or had an aftermarket CD player installed, CD players were not likely in your car. I didn’t have a factory cd player installed in a car until 2004. Before that it was a portable player with a cassette adapter.
So a 40yo would have a good shot at getting this joke. A 50yo should have no excuse.
I think this comment is purposely trying to get people to violate opsec