cassette
Latest
Tascam is making brand new cassettes for its ancient four-track recorders
Tascam wants to boost analog music-making by making high-quality cassettes for vintage four-track recorders.
A worldwide material shortage is delaying cassette production
Just when cassette tapes appeared to be making a comeback, a worldwide shortage of gamma ferric oxide has slowed production. National Audio Company (NAC), the largest cassette tape manufacturer in the US, sent a letter to its customers explaining that, due to the shortage, it is unable to fill orders on its usual 30-day schedule. Instead, it's working as fast as the raw material arrives.
Digital music may not have saved the environment after all
Logic would suggest that music downloads and streaming are good for the environment. You're not buying physical copies, right? Not so fast -- there's a chance things could be worse. Researchers have published a study suggesting that greenhouse gas emissions are higher now than they were when physical media was all the rage. While going digital has reduced the amount of plastic, the combination of extra power demands and the sheer popularity of music (you can listen to virtually anything for $10 per month, after all) may have offset other gains. Where vinyl produced 346 million pounds of greenhouse gasses at its height in 1977, downloads and streaming are estimated to pump out 441 million to 772 million pounds.
Tech Hunters: How the Walkman changed the way we listen to music
Today, billions of people have access to portable music, mostly thanks to smartphones. The world's music catalog is at our fingertips thanks to Spotify, Apple and Amazon's online store, but it's not always been that easy. It wasn't until 1979 that music lovers could finally get their hands on a true portable player: the Sony Walkman. Even though Sony wasn't the first to introduce magnetic cassette technology, the Walkman was the device that made it popular. The introduction of the Sony Walkman TPS-L2 allowed consumers to carry their pre-recorded tapes -- which were normally bound to car stereos or home music centres -- and place them inside a stylish 14 ounce, bluish-silver player with big buttons that could be strapped to their belt. Initially, Sony believed it could sell 5,000 units a month, but it smashed all expectations by shifting more than 50,000 in the first two. Fast forward to 2010 and the Japanese electronics giant had sold 200 million of the things, with cassettes easily surpassing vinyl record sales on the way. Although the Walkman brand is still alive today, thanks to an updated range of digital music players, it was at its most popular in the 80s and 90s (so much so that the word "Walkman" entered the Oxford English Dictionary in 1986). It's a design classic that revolutionised the world of music, at least until Steve Jobs reinterpreted it for the modern age. Julia Hardy hits the audio highway to find out what a good Walkman can cost now.
Of course the 'Stranger Things' soundtrack is coming to cassette
Just when you thought Netflix's sci-fi horror series Stranger Things couldn't get any more retro, a new version of the original soundtrack is due to be released on cassette. To celebrate its one year anniversary, Lakeshore Records announced that both volumes of the Season One soundtrack will be available on red cassettes, which come inside cases that look like mini VHS tapes.
After Math: Shady deals
It's been a heck of a week for soupy sales. In addition to all of the wild proclamations (and subsequent walk-backs) made by the Trump administration, D-Wave somehow found a buyer, California's power companies went looking for handouts, Faraday Future got itself sued already, Google banned a bunch of bunk ads and word on the street is that cassettes are the new vinyl. Numbers, because what else can you trust?
Cassette sales actually went up in 2016
We're barely a month into the new year, but it's already clear some of us still want to live in the past. Case in point: US cassette tape sales actually grew in 2016, with a whopping 129,000 copies sold. That might not be as many as the number of vinyl albums sold in the same year (13.1 million!), but it's an impressive 74 percent increase from the 74,000 sold in 2015.
Adult Swim's latest game embraces cassette glitches
Does something look slightly off with picture you see above? Don't worry, that's on purpose. Adult Swim Games and Fire Face are launching the surreal puzzler Small Radios Big Televisions on November 8th for PC and PS4, and its hook is a time-traveling cassette deck that lets you "reconstruct the past" of abandoned factories through tapes. Only here, reality is just as fragile as the tapes in question -- expect plenty of distortion, discoloration and other glitches that could play havoc with your head. Complete them and you'll find retrowave tunes from Owen Deery (also available on Bandcamp) as a reward. Given Adult Swim's solid track record with releasing off-kilter titles like Headlander and Westerado, it could be worth a try just to see how well this analog-meets-digital premise turns out.
Weird noises emerge from a Frankenstein cassette-tape keyboard
Of course everyone knows what a Mellotron is (no, everyone doesn't), but allow us to briefly explain anyway. The Mellotron is a keyboard hooked up to analog tape -- press a key and the instrument plays a corresponding section of sound on the tape. It's the original sampler, popularized by the Beatles, the Moody Blues and a handful of other bands in the 1960s and '70s. And now, it's back with a modern twist. The Crudman, from Brooklyn's Crudlabs, isn't exactly a Mellotron, but it operates similarly by connecting a keyboard to a hacked Walkman. Users can even chain together a few Crudman units for polyphonic sounds. You could even call them polyphonic sprees, if you're feeling saucy.
Metallica is releasing a remastered 1982 demo... on cassette
Dust off your tape players, folks: cassettes are still making a comeback. A number of independent artists have already leveraged the classic format, and Metallica is looking to join the bandwagon. The metal act recorded the seven-track No Life 'Til Leather demo back in 1982, and the effort will be released on April 18th as a limited-edition cassette. If you tossed out that boombox a long time ago, the remastered tunes will be available on CD and vinyl this summer. This is the first time that any of the band's demo material has been officially released, and it's the first in a series of reissues planned through Blackened Recordings, a Metallica-owned label.
Compact cassette turns 50, puts a tear in Soundwave's eye
Forget the MP3 player, or even the Walkman -- the real instigator of the portable audio revolution is the compact cassette, which just marked its 50th birthday. Philips formally launched the format on September 13th, 1963, bringing recorded sound to a truly portable (and more accessible) form factor. The technology didn't just kickstart the markets for media players, field recorders and boomboxes; it led to bootlegs, mixtapes and other ways to shake up the audio status quo. The cassette has largely disappeared outside of nostalgic reissues and transforming robot toys, but its effects are still visible after half a century of progress. [Image credit: Tony Unruh, Flickr]
Crapgadget: 'after school special' edition
School can be tough, especially when you're different. So what better way to keep the bullies at bay than to get your craptastic accessory freak on. In this special back to school bonanza of creeper tech, Hong Kong-based watchmaker o.d.m. mashes E.T. with a gummy bunny for a wrist-rocking return to infancy, Strapya World takes you by the baby's hand for iPhone 4 case comfort, while Dane-Elec's E-Razor USB stick goes undercover in a block full of erasing rubber. And if you're looking for a soundtrack throwback to match the solar-powered butterfly you've stuck in your Jansport, Brando's got you covered with its USB Cassette Capture & Player. Take a gander at the roundup below and make sure to vote for the crapgadget most likely to not succeed.
The in-dash tape deck is dead, mixtape memories will live forever
The rattling of naked cassettes in the glove box. The crunching of plastic cases in the footwell. That satisfying clunk when a tape got pulled down into the dash. For those who drove in the '80s and '90s those are memories of in-car audio, the ubiquitous tape deck, and it's now dead. Well, dead as a factory option, anyway. The 2010 Lexus SC 430 was the last car to offer one, no longer available in the 2011 edition. Thank goodness we'll always have Tape Deck Mountain.
Tascam Portastudio for iPad could make you a four-track superstar all over again
If you've never experienced the joy of conveying four precisely-played tracks onto a single, rattly plastic cassette tape, prepare to see what you've been missing. The iconic Tascam Portastudio is coming to iPad in a very virtual way, a $10 app that presents a simplified replication of the original's decidedly more tactile controls. You can mix four inputs to stereo output, which is stored on a pretend cassette -- and can then share via iTunes or Soundcloud, which is rather more useful than a picture of a tape. It's available right now for the iPad only, with no plans for a release on any other platform. Yeah, boo.
Sony pulls the plug on cassette Walkmans in Japan, makes epic mixtape
A cassette Walkman may now be nothing more than a puzzling artifact to some, but for those of a certain age it was the gadget of the day. Alas, it has long since been surpassed by other, more portable audio players that have replaced the fine art of the mixtape with "playlists," and it looks like even Sony has now accepted the inevitable. The company has reportedly ceased production of all cassette Walkmans and will stop selling them in Japan as soon as the current inventory runs out (expected to happen sometime in April). There will apparently still be Sony-branded Walkmans manufactured in China, however, although it's not clear how widely available they'll be. But let's not worry about that right now -- head on past the break for a brief look back at the Walkman in its heyday.
Tec Hideoto portable cassette player time-travels from 1994, gets USB audio for its trouble
Of all the USB tape players we've seen in our day, this is certainly one of them! Available from a Japanese company called Tec, Hideoto is a Walkman-esque portable cassette player that features USB and stereo headphone outputs, powered by either the aforementioned Universal Serial Bus or two AA batteries. It also comes with Cassette Mate software for Windows, which presumably makes saving your audio to MP3, WAV, or WMA a figurative snap. Available next month in Japan for roughly $57, at which point we expect to see these pop up at our favorite import e-tailers here in the states. Get a closer look after the break.
Sony's last cassette-blastin' boom box is precisely how Ruff Ryders roll('d)
Sony may not shed a tear for the 3.5-inch floppy disk when it meets its maker in March, but you'd better believe the company's crafted a retirement plan for the format that propelled it to fame: the compact cassette. To be fair, the CFD-A110 CD / cassette boom box above isn't actually a new product -- it's a relabeled CFD-A100TV from 2003 minus the nigh-obsolete analog TV band -- but if you're rocking magnetic mix tapes we're guessing you'll welcome this blast from the past. For your projected ¥20,000 (about $215) you'll get a pair of full-range speakers, 14 AM/FM presets, an external microphone port for karaoke and a remote when it launches in Japan this June 21st. What that won't buy you, however, is an obnoxiously large gilded chain, a beefed up left shoulder for carrying it around, and a time machine needed to actually fit in while using this. Ya heard?
Apple //e running source code loaded from an iPad
Stick with us here -- this is complicated but cool. So, Stewart Smith happened to see online that the Panic Software guys had an old Apple IIe (sorry, //e) sitting around their office, and he emailed to ask them if they could possibly use it to run an old text animation that he'd created for a song a while back. Being the considerate guys that they are, they agreed. There was a problem, though: Stewart's code was meant to be played on the old cassette deck source, and they didn't have one. "What did we have?" they ask, and the answer is, "an iPad." You can see the results in video over on their site, and they are magical. There are a couple of amazing things here: one, that the old source code can be "read" just as easily coming out of the iPad's audio port as it was when coming out of cassette tapes back in the day, and two, that the //e runs it so well. Let's also remember that we're watching it happen across the Internet in full audio and video quality, possibly even on an iPad itself. For all of the new and shiny that Apple has brought us recently, you almost forget how much history is building here, and it's somewhat surprising that a connection can be made between then and now so easily and elegantly.
Retro Cassette Stereo Mini Speaker gives a (tinny) voice to iPods
Those poor, poor speakerless iPod Nanos, Minis and the like -- how long have they had to suffer without a set of ultra-awesome speakers to give life to their music? Sure, there've been plenty of pretenders for the crown, but nothing quite as elaborately detailed as this Retro Cassette Stereo Mini Speaker. You read that right folks, stereo -- that means two, count 'em, two sweetly ornate sources of utterly unimpressive sound. Has the iPhone 3GS got an app for that? 'Course not. Read link details the full features, such as blister packaging (always good to know), and provides you with the means to acquire one in exchange for $32. Most righteous, no? [Via Gear Diary]