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notaplaceofhonour · 2 days ago

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adding more information/nuance:

when you pressed the fast forward button, it would typically stay depressed & keep fast forwarding indefinitely until it got to the end of (that side of) the tape or you pressed the play button to resume.

there actually were some cassette players/decks (players were sometimes called “cassette decks” or just “decks”), on the nicer end, that could “skip”; the skip feature just didn’t work like CDs or modern devices where you press the button & it started playing the next song immediately. it was simply an automated version of the manual fast forwarding described above that would stop at the end of a song. you would still have to wait for it to fast forward, though.

tapes had two sides; you’d listen to half an album on the A side, then you’d have to physically take out the cassette, flip it around, and play the B side (kinda like with a vinyl). nicer players/decks sometimes had an option where it would flip the thing that reads the cassette inside the deck so you didn’t have to take the tape out. the older, cheaper, & portable ones typically wouldn’t have this feature.

a single audio cassette could only hold so much audio. 60 minutes (30m each side) was technically the standard, but they could sometimes reach 150m (or 2 hours 30m; 75m each side) at the high end.

audiobooks on cassette, called “books on tape”, would typically require multiple cassettes to fit an entire book due to this size limitation. each cassette would come with an audio message at the end telling you you’d reached the end if the tape but not the book, and informing you which cassette to put in next. audiobooks often come packaged in big, hardback novel, book-sized cases with multiple slots (or more rarely, in even larger cases, bigger than a textbook. most of the ones I saw like that though were like… seminar recordings?)

“tape” technically referred to the (typically translucent gray) magnetic strip that was spooled up inside the plastic cassette, but we commonly referred to the whole cassette as “a tape”. this is true of any medium that used tape: audio cassettes, VHS, camcorder micro-cassettes, etc.

it was also common for the actual tape inside cassettes (which was very delicate) to come loose & spill out of the cassette. if you weren’t incredibly careful, this could be very bad and lead to permanent damage to the audio. you’d have to stick something like your finger (if it was small enough) or a pencil in one of the wheels on the side of the cassette and turn it to tighten the tape and make it go back inside.

Younger writers. Please, just know that you could not skip to different songs on a cassette tape, that’s CDs. With tapes you pressed fast forward or rewind and prayed.

Also, VHS tapes did not have menu screens. Your only options were play, fast forward, rewind, pause, stop, or eject.

Y’all are making me feel like the crypt keeper here, I’m begging you 😭

#cassette #cassettes #audio cassette #retro #old media #vintage #retro media #writing #writing reference #writing resources #reference

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90s-2000s-barbie · 3 days ago

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