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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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  • Rewind to the 80's Slight smile when magnetic tape was being used for all sorts of things but usually with some specialist hardware to bypass the consumer analogue inputs/outputs and without the modern digital compression schemes.

    Philips tried to market a 'Digital Compact Cassette' device commercially in the early 1990's, presumably hoping that the backward compatibility with analogue cassette tapes would give them an advantage over MiniDisc but both appeared to lose out to DAT.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Compact_Cassette

    I recall that there were some lower end multitrack recorders on the market (late 80's) that used all four tracks of the standard compact cassette simultaneously (no tape flipping) allowing you to play tracks back whilst recording to another, to build up a mix old school. If you can get hold of one of them then you could perhaps increase your data throughput.  

  • in reply to beacon_dave

    Minidisc got me through a couple of years of post-uni study : ) For various reasons, I didn't manage to turn up to lectures often, so I purchased two devices, and a friend would record the lectures and snail-mail them to me every few days. Was quite fun, my friends would whisper gossip to me, interspersed with the lectures, so that I wouldn't feel like I was missing out. Minidisc was really excellent technology as far as I was concerned. And they found a few niches e.g. the smaller radio stations would use them for recording programs, since they were relatively low-cost and had good-enough audio.

    But then MP3 players came along too quickly, everyone wanted the iPod.

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  • in reply to beacon_dave

    Minidisc got me through a couple of years of post-uni study : ) For various reasons, I didn't manage to turn up to lectures often, so I purchased two devices, and a friend would record the lectures and snail-mail them to me every few days. Was quite fun, my friends would whisper gossip to me, interspersed with the lectures, so that I wouldn't feel like I was missing out. Minidisc was really excellent technology as far as I was concerned. And they found a few niches e.g. the smaller radio stations would use them for recording programs, since they were relatively low-cost and had good-enough audio.

    But then MP3 players came along too quickly, everyone wanted the iPod.

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