• 0ops@piefed.zip
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      2 days ago

      As if cassette tapes were some obscure niche and not a major media format for years

        • arrow74@lemmy.zip
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          2 days ago

          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

        • Flamekebab@piefed.social
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          2 days ago

          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.

    • spongebue@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      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 😀

  • pedz@lemmy.ca
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    2 days ago

    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.

    • fakeman_pretendname@feddit.uk
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      1 day ago

      Yeah it sounded like boring music if you played it forwards. You had to play it backwards to get the awesome messages from Satan.

    • PartyAt15thAndSummit@lemmy.zip
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      1 day ago

      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.

  • ZILtoid1991@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    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.

  • Almacca@aussie.zone
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    2 days ago

    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.

    • 6nk06@sh.itjust.works
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      2 days ago

      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.

      • SanctimoniousApe@lemmings.world
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        2 days ago

        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.

        • otter@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          2 days ago

          IIRC, using two yielded the best results, as one wound while the second stabilized the other spool. 🤓

          • SanctimoniousApe@lemmings.world
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            2 days ago

            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.

            Wooden noise maker

          • PhobosAnomaly@feddit.uk
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            2 days ago

            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)

            • otter@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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              2 days ago

              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. 🤘🏼

              • PhobosAnomaly@feddit.uk
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                2 days ago

                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!

                • otter@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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                  2 days ago

                  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. 🤣

    • Davel23@fedia.io
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      2 days ago

      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.

  • LemmyKnowsBest@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    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.