They make these things with bluetooth now believe it or not.
Pair the tape
Stick it in a cassette player
Play music on your phone.
Pair the tape
I can’t even, why is this so funny?(◕‿◕')
Love me some anachronism stew.
God damn it. Another thing I have to charge.
I feel like this could work using a tiny generator attached to the drive’s motorized wheel, but that’s probably too complex to be cost-effective for something like this unfortunately.
That is a great idea.
I think they might use AAAs
Down to you if that’s worse or better.
I can see the use if you’re for example driving an older car with mostly original kit and don’t want an anachronistic stereo in it. So you pair up your fake cassette to your modern phone and can still play Spotify or w/e with the original kit.
There’s even an 8-Track version of it.
Also buying a whole-ass new car stereo (+ installation) is much more expensive than a bluetooth adaptor from China
So if you’re driving an ancient car out of necessity rather than for the aesthetic, this can help you get music into it.
F’course
Most cars from the age of tapes nowadays are relics. “Old cars” in the range that poor people drive out of necessity are from the CD age instead.
Am poor still driving my 1997 truck, it has an aux tho
You’d be surprised, I’ve seen cars from as late as 08 that still had cassette. Though that’s probably heavily dependent on manufacturer, model, region, and sub model type. But my point still stands, hell id wouldn’t be surprised if there was a car or two manufactured in 2012 that still came stock with a cassette deck.
…used to be folks also made adapters with FM micro-transmitters for cars without tape decks; might still do…
They still do. This is how I play stuff in my '03 Jeep.
How does that work from the fake cassette to the player? Does the fake cassette record what’s streaming to it to a loop of tape and let the player pick up the audio?
adjusts 🤓 glasses
So a cassette tape works by using electromagnetism. Ferric Oxide (AKA, literally rust powder) has a property that if exposed to a magnetic field, it will create a weak version of that magnetic field within itself
So the record head of a tape machine is an electromagnet that changes its field based on the actual audio signal, translating audio frequencies directly to magnetic directions and strengths, while the read head is a passive electromagnetic coil that picks up that weak magnetic field on the rust-coated plastic tape while a small motor runs the tape past it and emits it as a soundwave.
The tape adapter skips 90% of these steps —
— It just has an electromagnetic coil of its own, positioned so it lines up with the play head, and when you feed it an audio signal, that audio signal gets directly translated to a magnetic field just by running it through the coil. The tape deck picks it up and doesn’t even realise there is no tape running through
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I had one of those too. I don’t miss it at all, though, because the sound quality was dogshit. Now get off my lawn, damn kids!
You may have missed the protective film on the magnet head. When I had one, it was a night and day difference once I got the protective film off.
It’s a bit late to check that but I’m pretty sure i didn’t have any protective film there.
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Yeah it’s cassette quality. That’s what I’m talking about. It wasn’t anywhere near the quality of a direct AUX connection.
Most of cassettes lack of audio quality isn’t actually the quality, it’s the tape hiss. Without the tape there’s no hiss so they sound basically as good as a straight aux cable. It’s basically just a weird connector in the middle of the cable.
Psshhht. I used to have a microphone that let me SING ON THE RADIO. It literally put me on the FM airwaves. You may have heard some of my stuff.
HEY GOOD LOOKING I’LL BE BACK TO PICK YOU UP LATER
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I loved setting mine to the frequency of a local station and watching the confusion in other cars at a stop light if they were listening to the same frequency. I didn’t do it too often because it is pretty annoying though and not too hard to figure out who’s doing it.
I used to have one that would broadcast a short-range radio station that you would tune the car radio to. You’d have to make sure its frequency was far from an actual radio station or you’d get crosstalk. On long road trips you’d have to keep adjusting it.
Lol, we used those little transmitters that you plug into the cigarette lighter plug until several years ago in a mid 2000s car, and they’re still sold and used by people. The funniest thing that happened was when we were overtaking a semi who had one of these, but with a stronger transmitter, so for a couple of seconds we were listening to the guy’s random turbo folk music.
If the car was old enough you could plug a cassette adapter into an 8 track adapter.
Dear god, I had one of these. I was driving a 74 Ford pickup with an 8-track and it was the only way to play my music through the single speaker in the dash. High fidelity.
Plug… plug it into a zune
I actually had a Zune. They were pretty nice as far as MP3 players go.
Yeah, they were actually pretty ahead of their time. It was before people had become accustomed to music subscriptions, so that scared a lot of people away. But the fact that it would just automatically sync with your library, and you could download whatever songs you wanted for offline play in the car… It was groundbreaking at the time. Plus it had a built-in FM receiver, so you could listen to the radio while on the go too.
…my father-in-law still squirts, but mostly from neuropathy-associated incontinence…
Heck, I still use my old Zune. Replaced the battery, hard drive, and screen a couple of years ago and the thing is a beast.
Minidisc of gtfo
Good god. That’s three or more generations of electronics just dragged kicking-and-screaming into the 21st century. I love it.
All that’s left to do is send the receiver output to a PC or RPi, and serve it as a self-hosted streaming service.
My best friend in high school had a stereo with an 8-track recorder.
I loved these things. Never understood how they worked (still don’t) but I didn’t care!
Technology Connections has covered how they work.
Technology Connections is going to turn into the XKCD of explainer videos.
Electromagnetism and a touch of devil-math from the STEM layer of hell, as is with most technology.
Discman on a tray with little bouncy shocks, in an attempt to keep the CD from skipping, but it didn’t matter because it would skip anyway.
This somehow makes me feel older than the hip pain does
I think it’e because of how long ago it was. I feel like society hasn’t changed very much since ~2012 (last time this was necessary) so it all feels like one long continuous blur. And then you realize that was 13 years ago.
I have one that is bluetooth to cassette. Unfortunately, it has a lot of artifacts during playback. Opted for a bluetooth transmitter that connects to an empty radio channel? Frequency? Works well.
Sounds like an issue with your cassette deck. You should definitely be getting better audio quality with a cassette adapter, mine sounds better than a normal cassette tape. Every radio frequency transmitter I have ever tried has had severe artifacting on the high end (treble), especially prevalent on “S” sounds; they come out really static-y. At any rate, your better off doing literally anything else than repairing your cassette deck if it’s cooked, but its worth a go to try a standard aux cord cassette since they’re under $10.
I’ve actually opted to record my playlists onto cassette tapes, and I wound up using these more than the aux adapter.
I had one that turned 1/8" into it’s own radio frequency. It was really shitty but it worked!
Edit: just looked and they still sell them! https://www.amazon.com/Transmitter-Adapter-Built-iPhone-Players/dp/B076X3GSMH
I built one myself!
Probablydefinitely way more powerful than the legal limit, practically making it a pirate radio station…I built one, but by that time our local FM radio waves were so saturated that there was no good frequency to use.
Kewl
U need help? I did one myself with icecast and shit
Technology Connections’ video on the topic:
I have one of those in my car today.
The original aux cable! And you never needed to pair shit!
You can’t even pass people the aux anymore
Spotify Jams now. But passing the aux is a lost bonding experience
I got one of those USB dongles that can charge and output analog sound to aux.
There’s a whine that matches my RPMs because the thing doesn’t isolate the voltage from the charger and the audio signal that well. Luckily it isn’t very audible when it’s being driven (the sound, not the car). Oh I also need to unlock my phone before it even drives it and it takes a bit for it to switch over.
The phone needs to convert to analog to drive the speakers anyways, just fucking stick a mux on that to decide whether it drives the speaker amp or an aux wire. If the jack was too thick, imo it would have been better to introduce a new smaller analog jack standard.
