The fun bygone days of making your own cassettes

[Gringo557]

I started out compiling on reel to reel tapes. My dad's cousin brought home a really nice Sony reel to reel bought in Japan on the way home from Vietnam. Eventually somebody stole it. Then I started compiling on 8-track tapes. That only lasted about a year then cassettes came along and everybody jumped ship. Cassettes in the car was THE thing for a long while. Then came CDs, then came digital . . .

[Gringo557]

I spent the 1970s and 1980s and most of the 1990s in front of a cassette deck. There are boxes in the closet with over 400 tapes I made, which are all obsolete. I have everything that was on them from digital sources now, but I can't bear to throw them out. And I still have the tapes I got in mail trades, before it was possible to make your own CD.

I have a box of reel to reel live recordings of my first band that I can't bear to throw out. I really should burn them.

[Lord Reith]

I always wanted a reel to recorder but never got one. I came close when a friend of mine - actually my best friend at the time - gave his reel to reel to his next door neighbour. I was really hurt and disappointed. Don't think I ever saw him again!

At some point in my teens (when I had the time and energy to devote to things), I decided that it was too much work to find whatever specific Beatles song I was looking for in the album cassettes, so I bought a bunch of blank cassettes and made "singles" so that I would have one song per side of a cassette. I went in alphabetical order and would figure out which of the two songs I was putting on that single was the longest. I would record it onto one side and then I would take the cassette apart, cut the remaining tape and remove it, and then put the tape back together and record the other side.

That is amazing. And you've reminded me of the thing I didn't like about cassettes... interminable stop/start as you forwarded/rewound through a tape looking for a song. I just hated that.

The other downside to cassettes was the way one of the channels would sometimes come out softer than the other. So you'd record a rare stereo broadcast and then find out later that the left channel was barely audible. Never could figure out why that happened.

[robbmacc]

The homemade cs single creation. Wow.

I actually had a double deck that

A. Had a counter that displayed real time, as opposed to revolutions of the tape
B. Could 'sense' the blank spot between songs, so that you could forward to the next track.

[ianbuckers]

The homemade cs single creation. Wow.

I actually had a double deck that

A. Had a counter that displayed real time, as opposed to revolutions of the tape
B. Could 'sense' the blank spot between songs, so that you could forward to the next track.

In the late eighties to early nineties I worked in an electrical department of a local independent department store. Many cassette decks and all-in-one systems had B at that time. And the top end ones also had A. Technics, Sony, JVC, Akai etc.

Some of the hi-fi equipment I still have was bought there with my staff discount.

The store you ask? Living Homes. At the time owned and run by Philip Eavis and William Berry...both had famous siblings, one with a music connection the other a culinary one!

[Rickenbacker325]

There was nothing like opening a three pack of “Concertape” cassettes from Radio Shack…or Tandy…as LR reminded us of…We had a few home decks that were capable of some pretty decent edits and many unique versions and recreations of singles were made of various Beatle related things. I still own my pre-recorded tape collection as well as a good number of homemade compilation tapes..TDK made decent blanks in the 90’s..and I always liked the term “CrO2”..which was “high bias”..which was high end at the time…and there was “Metal” which was supposedly the best but I never really noticed that much of a difference.

[beatlesfanfromsop]

I remember back in 1989 when I bought an AIWA Shelf System which consisted of a CD Player,Dual Cassette Deck,Turntable
and AM/FM radio,and I used to record mostly CDS and once in awhile Vinyls if they were in a decent condition on to blank
cassette tapes so I can hear the tapes in my Walkman or Box Radio.
I did this until I got a Portable CD player when they became available years later.
Sometimes not all the music from a CD would fit onto one Blank Cassette,and a second Blank Cassette was used.
I still have these blank cassettes and also the prerecorded cassettes that were purchased in stores.
I wish especially The Beatles Capitol Cassettes were in better condition to play,
because I always enjoyed listening to them when I was a young kid to my teen years in the 1980's.
Mike

[misterclaudel]

I never stopped doing the "Cassette" thing.....it's called a CD-R and Nero has a Jukebox feature that you can put 70-90 mp3's on a CD-R, 400 on a DVD and 25G on a Blu-Ray....call me old but I never stopped the ideal just the media....

[zappaf78]

Does anyone want to share their artwork? I remember doing this to the VHS compilation tapes, a few cassette tapes and a couple of '45s.

[Onkster II]

Made my own cassette AND 8-track compilations! I was inspired by a Rolling Stone article about a guy who made his own themed compilations, and then designed themed j-cards to go with them. Nobody called them "mix tapes" then, or sneered about it. It was a cool way to get in on the notion of programming and packaging your own entertainment.

Which of course spread to local band recordings and releases, and the world of "Sound Choice", the semi-pro zine that championed all that in the 80s. (I miss that mag!)

Yes, it was great fun, but nothing compared to burning your own CDs. So much more versatile, clear, and didn't degrade like the tapes!

Now there's just playlists. Which is OK, but just...not terribly exciting. It doesn't feel like you're making a "thing"...