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I like how this sounds, but then again, I probably wouldn't

stanto

It's 3:30am and I've finished fighting with the Baldur's Gate 3 toolkit to edit a mod I'm working on, and a thought hits me.

Wouldn't it be funny to store music on a cassette?

No, not like that.

I'm talking about, digital music. Take say, an MP3 or equivalent, potentially lossy compression audio format - because it would be funnier. Then create an audio file at a low bitrate, depth and frequency. Then have write it to a cassette tape, like in the ZX Spectrum / Commodore 64 days.

Then play it back and decode it on the fly!

I believe it would be an interesting juxtaposition of technology while being a challenge to get the most out of the compression and data rates, and handling errors on the way. Resulting in a pretty hilarious audio file.

Consider it an art piece.

I wonder what the bill of materials would look like for that? I still have some as-new cassettes lying around...

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  • BoM could be as low as a sound card and a PC, or a Raspberry Pi (assuming a cassette recorder/player already exists). There are codecs like FreeDV which have a chance to be usable if you're looking for real-time playback on-the-fly (i.e. not buffering up a load of data over a longer time, and then playing out over a shorter time). But whether such codecs play nicely with tape (which will have slight speed and frequency deviations (wow/flutter) probably is for further study, since those codecs were not designed for tape. It won't sound very great (and they are more intended for speech, so the music will sound bad with such a codec), but perhaps if non-standard things were done (e.g. record at a higher tape speed, or use many tracks on the tape, etc., then that could help perhaps.

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  • BoM could be as low as a sound card and a PC, or a Raspberry Pi (assuming a cassette recorder/player already exists). There are codecs like FreeDV which have a chance to be usable if you're looking for real-time playback on-the-fly (i.e. not buffering up a load of data over a longer time, and then playing out over a shorter time). But whether such codecs play nicely with tape (which will have slight speed and frequency deviations (wow/flutter) probably is for further study, since those codecs were not designed for tape. It won't sound very great (and they are more intended for speech, so the music will sound bad with such a codec), but perhaps if non-standard things were done (e.g. record at a higher tape speed, or use many tracks on the tape, etc., then that could help perhaps.

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