Saturday November 26, 2022; 4:52 PM EST
- (4 min read)#
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- Because I like test equipment, and I like audio equipment, and I like fiddling around with knobs and dials, and I like music, and I like learning new things, and I like the things I liked when I was younger, I have bought a cassette deck from 1986.#
- It is cold and dark, so we take the Jetta wagon to school instead of the fun car. This car has a CD player, but it also has a cassette player. We've been listening to the Traveling Wilburys and the Awesome Mix tapes from Guardians of the Galaxy. This has been fun, and part of the fun has been showing off all the little things about how it used to be in the olden times. #
- There is no song navigation, which means you can't pick a song from a list. You can't skip to the next song, either. What you get instead is called "fast forward", which is not fast, and "reverse", which is also not fast: it can take like ten or fifteen seconds to skip a song. You can never be sure exactly how long this will take, so you need to stop and play every few seconds. #
- Also it always picks up from where you left off. Like, if it's in the middle of a song when you parked the car, it will be on that song when you get back. Unless you hit the eject button, then it might be in the middle of some other song, because that song is on the "other side" of the tape. The songs on the other side are in backward order. If you fast forward on this side, it goes backward in time on the other side. It's a mirror universe over there, where time flows exactly opposite to ours. This is not how time travel and parallel universes generally work in movies, so it can take some getting used to.#
- You get like four or five tapes in the car, or as many as you like in a pile on the floor, because these things are huge and only contain a couple dozen songs each.#
- If you eject the tape, you have to put it back into a little plastic case, which provides no real protection, and which itself is easily damaged. It's also super fiddly, and not in good way. You do this because the case's job isn't to protect the cassette, which is actually pretty hardy if you disregard the whole "spools of flimsy, stretchy plastic" thing. The case is there to store the J card, which has all the navigation info and documentation for this release, printed in extremely small type, in white knocked out of poorly registered four-color black, which means it's fuzzy and has color halos.#
- Together, all these limitations of this technology, combine to produce a default scenario where you listen to one side of the tape all the way through, flip the tape to the other side, and then listen to the other side, in a loop. In the real world, you will end up liking one side more than another, or just one song on one side, so you learn to navigate the whole parallel-universe-backwards-time thing. It's fun!#
- I only have three tapes anyway, because at some point I got rid of all my tapes, of which I had a few hundred. I got rid of them because that is a lot of tapes.#
- Before I got rid of the tapes, and the tape deck, I transferred some to mp3. Except of course the dozens I didn't transfer because I got bored with the project. You have to import the songs in real time, there is no fast forward, if an album is 45 minutes long then it takes 45 minutes to transfer. You have to adjust the volume manually. You want the loudest possible signal for best results, but tapes are produced at all sorts of levels, so you have to watch the meters.#
- But now I have no tapes. To get tapes, I can either buy new tapes, or make my own tapes. When you make your own tapes, you can pick your own songs, and put them the order you like. This is the mix tape. #
- Making a mix tape takes a lot of time, because you have to get all the records out, and find the song, and get the record out of the jacket, and flip it over, and put the needle down, and press Record, and listen to the entire song, and press Pause. Then do it over again for the next song. #
- (Also, the Record button is often actually two buttons, which you hold down like you're playing a chord on a piano. It's a skill. You gain a lot of skills with cassette technology, is what I am saying.)#
- This is going to be loads of fun.#