Fannish 50 2024 #2: Cassette tapes

[sholio]

Well, these posts are definitely not proceeding at any great rate of speed, but at least I'm doing more than none? My theme is technically "older canons I'm nostalgic about" but I don't see any reason not to expand it to media in general.

Something random I have been thinking about lately: cassette tapes!

I assume that I happened to hit squarely in what is actually not a very wide window in terms of the general 20th century timeline (a decade or so, maybe even less) for experiencing cassettes as your primary means of music delivery at a formative age. I missed records completely - I've never even used a turntable - and CDs came in when I was in my teens; I got a CD player and a Discman as a teenager and from then on, music was mostly on CD for me, except for the occasional situation where cassettes made more sense (e.g. tape decks in cars, which IIRC kept being a thing into the late 90s/early 2000s).

But in between: cassettes! The first music I bought for myself was all on cassette, audiobooks were around (fairly ubiquitous in convenience stores for car drives), and they were also pretty commonly used in a school context, or kids' books that came with a cassette with songs or other bonus content, things like that.

Aside from that, cassettes were great for taping stuff. Actually, I feel like in a way, cassettes were more of an easy gateway recording device than CDs ever were; it feels like modern phone and digital camera recording is a lot more like cassette recording than CD/DVD, which were actually fairly challenging to burn to, especially if you wanted to create a device-playable version! But cassettes were just easy, the same kind of push-button ease of recording that we have with modern phones. It was so easy that a small child could do it, and in fact my sister and I used to make a lot of "radio plays" on cassette using one of those tape-deck-style player/recorders - like this. (Actually that is almost exactly what ours looked like in the 80s. I'm astounded they still make them.) We had a nearly infinite supply of free cassette tapes because my very religious aunt got us on a mailing list for a church that sent us taped sermons in the mail every week. Since my mom wasn't interested, sister and I promptly absconded with each week's cassette and used them to record whatever a couple of grade schoolers with a cassette recorder could think of - the aforementioned radio plays, music, audio "letters" to send to our grandparents, etc.

Cassettes were also great for recording off the radio. I mean, the quality was total crap, obviously, although somewhere in my early teens I acquired a dual cassette deck with a built-in radio, which meant you could record straight off the radio and at least avoid too much background noise. This also made it possible to record from tape to tape, or make mix tapes of my favorites. CDs were a step up in sound quality, but actually kind of a step down in being able to manipulate the music yourself, at least until computers caught up with cheap, recordable CD drives (which was the mid to late 90s). But it was still more complicated, because you had to mess around with codecs and ripping, as opposed to the visceral simplicity of sticking two tapes in the machine and pushing record; the only thing you had to watch out for was making sure you didn't record over the one you wanted to keep! Here it was useful to know that there was a little plastic tab that you could - push over? snap off? I forget exactly, but there was a copy-safe thing that you could use to stop a tape from being overwritten. (This was to stop it from being copied to, not copied from - basically made it read-only. There was technically anti-copy protection on some cassettes too, making the results come out screechy or garbled, but this was really more of a thing with videotapes.)

Do I miss them? Really not at all ... music on the computer is vastly superior in almost every way, especially now that I can play it from my phone directly to my car's stereo or other devices. But I liked them, and I do think that for sheer ease of use for a kid, for both playing and recording, they were great. In fact I think I still have a small box of old cassettes around here somewhere, some purchased ones and some home recorded. I'm tempted to dig it out and see what's in there and whether there's still anything at all around here that can play them.

Comments

[black_bentley]

My aunt used to make mixtapes for me <3 and I can remember doing tape-to-tape recording (and CD-to-tape, when CDs were a thing but my car was so old it only had a tape deck). My parents still have a stereo with a turntable and a double cassette deck at their house, so if any of mine turn up I could probably still play them :D

I do like being able to play music directly from my phone now, but I also kind of miss the time I used to spend deciding what to put on a mix cassette/CD for car journeys...

[ivyfic]

Don’t know if you’re a 99 percent invisible listener, but they’ve done two great episodes on cassette tapes:
https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/loud-and-clear/
https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/long-strange-tape/

[lilacsigil]

I was also in the cassette age group! I did play my parents' records sometimes but I never owned any myself. Almost every tape I owned was taped off the radio, mostly because our only music-playing radio station until I was 16 was a super boring easy listening top 40 station (but only if it's not new or scary in any way). But after 10pm, they sometimes had DJs who would play other things, so we would stay up and tape them. Then, in 1991, we finally got the national youth station Triple J and it was a revelation. All my geeky friends and I would lend each other books or comics with an accompanying mixtape.

I never ran into that kind of copy protection, just the one where the little plastic tabs were broken off but you could fix that with stickytape!

[yhlee]

I remember cassettes with fondness! Including the Commodore 64 that ran off cassettes and...I think it had some VERY primitive limited form of BASIC, which at the age of six was a MYSTERY to me, but I ALSO remember my parents bringing home a kids' book on computers that explained "this is software, this is hardware," etc. in 101 terms. And also what I remember was that the machine was so memory-limited that to play the Shooting Gallery (?) game, after a certain point the game would pause and prompt you to TURN THE CASSETTE OVER TO THE OTHER SIDE for that part of the program!

I loved playing cassette tapes, although I never had very many of them. (Of course, I never had comparatively many CDs either, when that became a thing.) But I loved being able to record my own music and then record OVER on top so you had the original music and then something added to it, so that I could play duets with myself. Janky janky janky sound quality, but I'm not the audiophile in the family, and being able to compose AND PLAY duets (or trios) with myself was so fun. :3

My other fond memory was when my sister picked up the AUDIOBOOK cassettes of Nine Princes in Amber, as read by Roger Zelazny himself, and we listened to it with joy - he passed before I had any chance to meet him but I really treasure that I can remember, and now listen to in CD/computer format, his voice. :3

[lunabee34]

I've got some old cassettes I can't play anywhere, but I can't bear to get rid of them. LOL

[pauraque]

I was the right age to make little radio plays on cassette too! I sometimes played at being a reporter and "interviewed" long-suffering people in the neighborhood as if extremely mundane events of the day were newsworthy. You're right that the ease of use made it a great tool for kids to make stuff.

[princessofgeeks]

I used to make tapes of my favorite songs...mixtapes, I guess they were called. I still have several.

Also I have a commercial CD of a solo performance by a local jazz pianist who is now dead. I will have to see about getting it transferred somehow to digital form pretty soon!!!

[melagan]

This brings back memories. For the longest time, I drove a car that took cassette tapes and I used it all the time.

[leesa_perrie]

I had a recorder a lot like the one you linked to!! I remember the days of recording off the radio and hoping the family kept quiet whilst doing so, lol! And then the improvement of being able to tape directly off the radio to cassette with the tape/radio/record 'hi-fi' that I got! I did start my childhood with records, listening to my parents' albums and singles to start off with, then buying my own. Tapes came in about aged 8 or 9, but I still bought records for a while too, probably until CDs came along. And yes, I also made mix tapes!

I also remember the basic computer we had, where the programs were on audio cassette! Used to play them and listen to the weird 'music' they made, lol!! But then I also remember dial up internet... *suddenly feels old*

[(Anonymous)]

I was lucky enough to have been given a small stereo system as a teenager so I could record tapes from the radio and from vinyl. I still have a box of them as my last car was twenty years old when it became uneconomic to repair and had a tape deck which worked longer than its cd player.
I still have a tape of games for a Commodore Pet.

[sartorias]

Oh I remember what a delight cassettes were--one's music became portable! We used to sit next to the radio with our cassette players and the mic ready to turn on so we could get favorite songs when they got played. It took hours to build a playlist, and then the tape would wear out and jam, but at the time they were the hot tech.

Now I have precious voices I'll never hear again on very old cassette tapes that I'm terrified to play lest them jam and tear.

[madripoor_rose]

Ha! I have a boom box and an old cookie tin of cassettes on the end table behind me right now. And a couple of audiobooks on tape we break out during long power outages.

Long before anyone around here had a vcr we used to record the audio of tv shows, mostly Star Trek TOS and the A Team and take them and a player to school and listen to them at lunch. Unfortunately I don't have any of those, wore out from replay.

[hamsterwoman]

We had a nearly infinite supply of free cassette tapes because my very religious aunt got us on a mailing list for a church that sent us taped sermons in the mail every week

Ha!

I'm also the cassette generation, and one of the neat thing about cassettes in the USSR was that they were a way to pass around music that was not commercially available -- subversive or the wrong kind of foreign or whatever. So I have memories of my parents bringing home these contraband cassettes from their friends and listening to them.

And the comment above reminded me about cars with cassette tapes! Our first car in the US didn't have that, because it had zero frills, but the ones after that did, and there were long roadtrips and also that summer that I interned at the company where my father worked and commuted with him when we played our way through the 10 cassette collection of Vladimir Vysotsky that we got from a friend of my parents'.

[trobadora]

I was a bit earlier than you, apparently - CDs didn't come in until later for me, and I did have some records - but cassettes were definitely my main music medium for a long time. I still use them, even, because my car still has a cassette deck. (I have a Chinese playlist I put on cassette for that! *g*) And I have cassette player/radio/cd player thing with two cassette decks still, though I rarely use it now. (I don't listen to music very much.)

it feels like modern phone and digital camera recording is a lot more like cassette recording than CD/DVD

Oooh, yes, that's an excellent point!

100% agreed about cassettes being great for taping stuff! I was just talking to someone about taping music off the radio back then, and I still have a lot of my old tapes. Including songs I'll never be able to find again because I have zero idea what they're called or who the artist is. *g*

in fact my sister and I used to make a lot of "radio plays" on cassette using one of those tape-deck-style player/recorders - like this

Awww, that's delightful! I had one just like that - actually, it's still stowed away somewhere, I believe, because that thing was sturdy and never broke.

Here it was useful to know that there was a little plastic tab that you could - push over? snap off? I forget exactly, but there was a copy-safe thing that you could use to stop a tape from being overwritten.

Yeah, there was a little plastic thing you could break off to secure the tape! Official cassettes (non-empty ones, I mean) came without them, but you could tape over the hole and then record over it anyway, which was great for repurposing stuff you definitely no longer wanted to keep.

[via_ostiense]

So many good memories - I remember listening to a favorite song over and over on a Walkman, and having to rewind the tape to replay it. And audiobooks from the library used to come in thick binder-style containers with several cassettes. It's mind-blowing when I think about how nowadays I can get a library audiobook on my phone, no large box of tapes or CDs required.

[musesfool]

Cassettes were my main way of consuming music as a kid and teenager. I loved making mixtapes! I made them for myself and for everyone I knew. It's not nearly as much fun to put together a playlist, tbh.

[timespirt]

I still have all of them. More cassettes than anything else. Records, cassettes, CD's and digital stuff. I like the CD's not too fond of the digital stuff but you don't have much choice these days. Most are digital. I used to get mixed tapes from Walmart or did them myself to listen to.

[anna_wing]

Yes yes yes yes yes.

[yalumesse]

Oh! No, I had cassettes only for a while too, though I was fairly young when CDs took over. For at least 3 or 4 years I had both equally, and for a long time I held onto cassettes because I could record them to have what I wanted. Lots of audiobooks on cassette too. I miss those, never found them back.

Nostalgia is great :)

[aelfgyfu_mead]

Yes! I'm of the cassette era as well. I still have a few cassettes around somewhere. I finally threw away the ones I taped off the radio in the early 80s.