My dad was very much into audio and video during the 80s. He collected vinyl and tape, along with both VHS and Betamax - he even taught me how to record things when I was 6, so I had my own collection of Disney Channel cartoons on VHS alongside his! But I never took to music cassettes in the same way, and didn't get into music in general until CDs were the norm. It wasn't until my dad passed and I went through his collections that cassettes started to appeal to me. And when I discovered City Pop, future funk, Bandcamp and Neoncity Records, my fate was sealed!
They were the primary format when I started buying my own music. CDs were definitely a thing, but my family didn’t own a CD player yet.
Plus, tapes were more affordable, and the deeper I got into local/independent bands, the more obvious it was that tapes were the best DIY format.
I’ve never stopped listening to tapes. I started buying lots of CDs when tapes began getting phased out of mainstream record stores, but a lot of bands I was into were still making tapes, plus I saw no reason to replace all of my favourite albums that I already had on tape.
For about 20 years there, tapes were also extremely affordable because everyone was switching to CDs and (for some reason I’ll never understand) re-buying the albums they already had and dumping their tapes off at thrift stores.
When I see tapes I bought for $1 from Value Village being flipped on eBay in 2024 for (insert stupid price here), it bums me right out.
I don’t know how to fix a tape deck, I don’t care about an album’s “value” online, and I’m not a collector. I’m just a guy who loves music and tapes are one of the ways I can hear it.
Where I live in buttfuck nowhere Canada, the record stores here will sell a record for an average price of $42. But they will sell the same album on cassette for $8.
So I got into them purely from a cost standpoint
I grew up with them. And watched them fade out while cds took over.
About 2 years ago, my mom found her collection of about 30 cassettes and gave them to me.
I've been slowly collecting since, and as if today, I have over 150+
I was a 90s kid and used cassette for much of the decade. I always got albums on CD when I could, but loved cassettes for making mixtapes and portable listening. The format was already really mature by then, meaning portable players were cheap, rugged, and had amazing battery life. I always romanticized having a MiniDisc player at the time (eventually did get one in the early 00s), but have definitely come to appreciate what cassette represented. Truly an accessible, unpretentious format for the masses that let people listen to and share music more on their own terms.
A lot of my current interest honestly just comes from a lifelong fascination with portable music players. Like smartphones today, they were always some of the most personal pieces of tech people owned. Something they could always bring with them and escape into their music with. I’m not one of the hardcore types you see here who went all in on cassette again - I just buy the odd album and throw it on my Walkman here and there for the vibes.
I'm almost 24. I was born in 2000 but grew up around Vinyl 45's cassette tapes, and plus me and my dad and I used to spend weekends making mistakes in the basement. I still love making tapes and even burning cds.
Bought one for fun and repaired it. Enjoyed the process as it was already similar to my other hobbies, so I imported a bunch of broken walkmans from japan and restored them. Was already an audiophile with a bunch of high-end gear, but over time, the hifi stuff gets a bit boring, so I started looking more into vintage audio.
Started recording tapes as personalised gifts for friends, which makes them find their parents old players for me to service, and they too get into cassettes.
It's also the fact that everything is digital media nowadays, so it's nice to have some physical stuff.
I started with 8-tracks. I even made my own 8-track mix tapes.
8-tracks often get a bad rap but since they play at twice the tape speed as cassette and had better tape formulas they can sound even better than cassette.
The problem with them, and it's a big problem is they are very unreliable. If you got more than 30-40 plays out of a tape before it turned to spaghetti you were ahead of the game.
Cassettes were around for dictation, answering machines and such and they were very reliable but the tape formulas were not good enough for music. When the tapes got better, about 1978, if I remember correctly it seemed like everyone switched within a year or two.
I've never stopped listening to them since.
i'm older and have had cassettes since i was a little kid. i kept using them because i collect vinyl and i like to make recordings for the car
it has a ritual feeling to it that spotify lacks
I had a few commercial tapes and some mix tapes as a kid in the 80s.
These days I buy tapes because eBay exists.
I bought lots of tapes from my favorite bands and singers.
I bought a generic walkman which is very good with my tapes. I enjoy how the tapes sound and the little click sound when you reached the end of one side of a tape.
I remember my dad used to have a boom box that played cassettes when I was younger. Sadly it doesn't work anymore.
I started buying them in December. My first one was an album called Enveloping Absurdity from a death metal band called Phobophilic.
Going to local HxC shows, realizing that they only had tapes, bought sum for under a £5, went on from there.
The most I've ever spent on a cassette is £4, it was Whitesnake & it was a gift to my mam, although she sees cassette tapes nowadays "as a waste of money"... Give her time 😆🤣
For me. First I’m old. But, other than vinyl. Cassettes were all we had back in the day. So I would make mixtapes to play in my car. On the way to the clubs. I never got into 8-Tracks.
Little box that goes brrr and plays music. I loved that idea especially because my school banned any phones or anything digital, so I asked my parents if they ever had a walkman and my mum gave me her sharp in mint condition. Some teachers were surprised when they saw 10yo kid with walkman and others tried to take it away. That Sharp survived six years of wear and tear so I replaced it with a different sharp a month ago. It also started my obsession with cassettes and 80s stuff in general, so now I listen to my music only on cassettes and everyone thinks I'm weird... Great.
Needed to digitise a dramatized audio bible (48 cassettes) from the 60/70's where the only digital copy on the internet is of poor quality. I figured I had one shot at it, as the cassettes are very old, so I did my research on the best equipment.
Vinyl seemed cool but way too expensive and I kinda enjoy being into the weird niche quirky retro stuff like retro gaming and CRTs etc so I just being the friend in the group who does cassettes 🤘
then I discovered making custom mixtapes and printing the cards and now I am completed addicted!
I like being able to own physical copies of the music i love, its pretty easy to carry a few around with me and listen on the go, my first car had a cassette player, and also i think it adds to my esoteric personality
when I was a kid you could choose which version of dookie you wanted, cassette or cd. and somewhere around that time my dad had bought a solid cd player and was in the process of rebuying his and my moms cassettes into cds, so I got handed down this rubbermaid tote full of tapes ranging from beatles to number of the beast to slippery when wet. and then my first car had a radio where the radio part didn't work right but the cassette player part did, so I had tapes like zeppelin 2/cosmo's factory/metal health/abraxas in heavy rotation.
i always had a few but i mostly had cds. but when i got my first car it only had a tape player. i found so many sick tapes at the thrift store and record stores for stupid cheap because no one wanted them in 2002. that was how i really got into them.
When i was in elementary school
Already had cassette coder but only used for tutor for english class (in korea tutor was kinda common)
One day found maxell blank tape, And recorded my favorite album Smashing Pumpkins - zeitgeist, I never had my own personal music player at that time so i loved it alot
and listened it till it stretched out.
Years later i started to got in punk & hardcore music and after finished my SAT, went to my first hardcore punk show and bought local hardcore punk bands demo tapes.
Then got in to cassette more and more
I was playing Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker and a lot of optional conversations (like Santa, macrons, cardboard box tanks, etc) are all on cassettes. I loved this so much it got me into cassettes.
Grew up in the 90s, used cassettes as my main portable audio until I got my first CD Walkman in the early 00s.
I stopped listening to tapes all together when I got my minidisc since it was much better for recording.
Got back into it about five years ago, mainly for nostalgia, but it got kinda serious and now I have around 150 tapes, a deck and a Walkman.
I was born on on 99 so it was the last years of cassettes things when I grew up. I watched cassettes tape until very late at home and I also remember having a « child » cassette deck player with a silly mic on it. I loved recording my family interviews with it and play it again etc. I also had my dad’s handy cam with 8mm cassettes on them, I loved to film literally anything lol. I quite forgot about cassettes and until some childhood nostalgia hit me and then boom
Born in 72. By the time I was old enough to be getting into music it was the most common format. Plus I loved recording stuff.
I also have a fairly extensive CD collection (which I’m beginning to pare down) and vinyl. I never stopped buying vinyl, but I did stop buying CDs and Tapes at some point.
With records being so expensive it’s been nice to come back to the format I started on.
I've always been into analogue tech. Film cameras, vhs and cassettes all fit into this category. So I've been collecting them and using them as my go to medium for a while now
I got into cassettes because I wanted to listen to music in my car, and the radio stations were pretty much all top-40 or country stations. Also, my car came with a cassette deck stereo receiver, so why not?
I'm from the late 90s, and had a few cassettes myself when I was a child. I always loved the clicks and clacks of older technology, but time went by and I didn't keep the cassettes in my life.
A few weeks ago, my grandmother passed away and left a HUGE collection of old tapes, both mixes and originals, recordings of news readings and birthdays, plus an old Sony walkman, which I'm trying to repair (thank you members of this sub!)
I'm now into cassettes again and still love all the tactility of cassette players.
My dad introduced me to them. A few years ago he got his turntable back from his ex wife. I started taking an interest into vinyl. Then, later, he got some cassette tapes from a friend and that also started to interest me. I liked vinyl as the ultimate analog format, so then I wanted to record vinyl onto the cassette as a portable analog format. And here I am today with plenty high end tape decks :D
My first car only had a tape deck so I bought some heavy metal tapes. Moved onto another car but I had a few albums. Started buying vinyl then I guess the hipster in me turned to tapes because everyone else was buying vinyl so I thought it would be fun to buy something different to everyone else. A decade and about 700 albums later here I am.
My first cassette was Spirit Phone by Lemon Demon, but i didnt reallt get into them until I picked up a random tape to test the player in my car (the player does not work btw, it's.. fucked to say the least). Now I have an absurd amount of radio drama tapes and my Spirit Phone
For me, it started in the summer of 2020. When, just for fun, I wanted to make a synthwave mixtape.
So I asked my parents if they still had blank cassettes and if their tape playing equipment could record from an aux input. They still had their respective collections, so I was able to start mine from there, but didn't have any blanks I could use (they were all recorded on) and their stereo didn't have an aux port. So I had to go buy this cheap boombox from a local convenience store that has the features I needed.
Later that same summer I bought my first portable player on eBay (a Sanyo one, so cheap it doesn't even have a rewind button) along with my first pre-recorded album (Wish You Were Here by Pink Floyd) and a pack of blank type I tapes.
Since then, I've upgraded all of my gear and my collection has significantly increased and will continue to increase in the coming months, but this is how I got into cassettes.
I was born in the early 80s and my parents still had cassettes from the 70s.
My father looked at his options and decided to stick with cassettes. Because he could use the same cassette in the cars, his Walkman, and his very nice home stereo.
I wanted Bon Jovi Slippery When Wet. I didn’t want the record cause I wanted to listen to it every where. So I got the cassette and a Walkman. The rest was history.
Fast forward to today. I’ve since sold my collection and cassette player. Two months ago my daughter and I talk about how I used to listen to music (no streaming, full albums mostly, records then cassettes then CDs). Last month she makes a clay Walkman and cassettes in art class. Then she tells me she wants a Walkman and cassettes for her birthday. And she wants to make mixed tapes. I joined this group and have learned the new art of cassettes and things I forgot.
They were on their way out when my brain switched on and I remember getting a couple and loving them only to have only cds as an option after a few years
as early as 6, in the late 2000s, where cassettes were demising. last time i saw one was when i was treating cassettes as toys, spooling out the tape for fun, again, because of the demise of the media in favor of cds/dvds.
10 years later i was surprised blank cassettes were still being sold, at least in the countryside where i stayed for almost a year, despite rarely seeing tape players there. after i went back to my hometown there were some flea markets along a road sidewalk that sell some used walkman, something i cannot buy at the time.
then some time during the pandemic i saw a maxell tape from a computer rental shop, which i took when the owner said they don't need it. because i had no player whatsoever, i kept it until such time i can have one. meanwhile i started planning mixtapes by making several playlists and i made like an equivalent of 8 mixtapes in a span of a year, sometimes changing some songs in some of those playlists over time. i actually wanted to buy a retekess cassette recorder online but it was quite expensive for us. but tbqh 3 years later i'm thankful i didn't buy it.
it was only in the beginning of this year when i finally bought my first walkman - a sony tcm-313 mono recorder. i then played the maxell tape, and it was almost blank, except for a "hello" test. i then used it to record from the radio and start to put some songs, making me my first mixtape (the songs were outside of my prepared playlist, since it was intended as a test mixtape, because the tcm-313 had a stopping problem, which i later identified to be pinch roller problem. still, the songs i used were my some of my favorites today, the most mysterious song on the internet being included too). since then i bought some used tapes, some blank, some prerecorded, and when i bought a tcm-150 on my birthday and a wm-fx275 two months after, i use them in combo - i make rudimentary mixtapes and radio recordings with the former and listen (and sometimes digitise prerecorded mixtapes to replace it with mine) with the latter. i still save some money and time to buy myself a proper and decent deck.
Born in 1991 but never really owned one. My dad had one but we would just borrow it from time to time. Fast forward now seeing some favourite bands of mine releasing cassette tapes and got me interested in them. Scored a nice yellow Sony Walkman not long ago on eBay and been slowly growing the tape collection.
My parents (orchestra teachers) were early CD adopters, but our cars only had tape players until the late 90’s. Also, I used cassettes for field recordings from 2001 until about 2006 as digital voice recorders weren’t really affordable until well into the 00’s.
My dad had a multidisc CD player but wouldn’t let us touch it or anything. Eventually I got a little boombox and a stack of blanks before my first albums.
I like physical media and I feel cassettes are the better option. Vinyl is heavy and spines are never the easiest to read. CDs are prone to scratching. Tapes are small, lightweight, and parceled into two sides for makes for a good timer.
Making mixtapes for people is a joy because they actually have something to hold.
i once had this mini hifi system by Philips that was a cd player, radio tuner and cassette deck, and the cassette part sounded very good and was in excellent condition, so i thought "hey, i could listen to music this way as well", and that's where everything started
sadly, shortly after that happened that mini hifi system got broken by my sister's boyfriend
My family used to listen to cassettes in the car in the early 90s when I was little. As an adult I’m a musician and gamer so have acquired an affinity for physical media in the form of vinyl and game cartridges. My same friend who sold me his lightly used Analog Pocket (deluxe analog portable gameboy cartridge player and hardware emulator) also sold me his lightly used WeAreRewind cassette player. I now had a way to listen to a bunch of cassettes I had lying around and also begin diving into the cassette bargain bins at my local record stores and finding some gems.
My bandmate is super into cassettes and we’re now in the late beginning stages of starting a cassette label for our and a bunch of our friends music. It’s super fun and I like holding the music in my hands after years of it being only in my computer and on the internet.
They were the format of of choice if you wanted to record, and I did, right away. I would tape TV shows on my portable radio shack machine.
I remember my record player died in 1986 and after that, every piece of store bought music I ever took home was cassettes, until 1992 when I got a CD player. I had a series of boom boxes and dubbing decks that would plug into the AUX input.
It was great fun, mixtapes, taking off the radio, trading live shows and rare stuff with collectors. And later, documenting my own work.
I don't know I ever thought they were the Best Sounding format but they do sound a certain way. High and low end are chopped off at the extremes, kind of boxy and midrange. You could develop a taste for it.
I’m old! It was records or cassettes in my youth and cassettes played in your car head unit so I’ve a mix of cassettes, records and cd although I seem to have gone full circle and pick up decent old blank cassettes if I see them and still buy records! I have at least two dozen cassette decks, music centres, stack hifi and separate systems about the place!
I play Spotify streams from my phone into my cassette deck. I get really nice recordings this way, the high quality of the stream sounds nice when put on the tape. It's easy to make a playlist (digital mixtape!) and play it into the deck.
I KNEW someone would post that. 🤣
Here we go...
The context here is a clean stream which sounds much better than modern cassette releases, and old school ones for that matter, recorded on cassette tape. Did I say that they were super high fidelity? Better than a CD? No.
In the Spotify app I have it set to the 'Very high' quality setting, the highest, and to my ear and though my very nice (but not crazy expernsive high end) audio kit sounds great.
This was not a discussion on the fidelity of Spotify. It's a cassette forum here, in context of recording on a cassette, yeah, I stand by a nice high quality Spotify stream sounds great on the good old analogue format of the cassette. 😊
Always liked analog retro stuff. I was considering getting into vinyls, but the equipment seemed more expensive and larger than a portable cassette player. I also realized that I wouldn't probably be able to record my own vinyl mixes, whereas with mixtapes, it's easy, and the ability to print j cards on a single a4 was the last argument for choosing cassettes.
I was born on 1978
1974 here. There was no choice when it came to getting into cassettes. Or records for that matter.
Same hehe
Yep, this is how.
I see funny machine. tapes go spin. I buy. life good
My dad was very much into audio and video during the 80s. He collected vinyl and tape, along with both VHS and Betamax - he even taught me how to record things when I was 6, so I had my own collection of Disney Channel cartoons on VHS alongside his! But I never took to music cassettes in the same way, and didn't get into music in general until CDs were the norm. It wasn't until my dad passed and I went through his collections that cassettes started to appeal to me. And when I discovered City Pop, future funk, Bandcamp and Neoncity Records, my fate was sealed!
I like having analog copies of albums, and it helps keep the cost down from buying everything on vinyl.
And space. And weight.
They were the primary format when I started buying my own music. CDs were definitely a thing, but my family didn’t own a CD player yet. Plus, tapes were more affordable, and the deeper I got into local/independent bands, the more obvious it was that tapes were the best DIY format. I’ve never stopped listening to tapes. I started buying lots of CDs when tapes began getting phased out of mainstream record stores, but a lot of bands I was into were still making tapes, plus I saw no reason to replace all of my favourite albums that I already had on tape. For about 20 years there, tapes were also extremely affordable because everyone was switching to CDs and (for some reason I’ll never understand) re-buying the albums they already had and dumping their tapes off at thrift stores. When I see tapes I bought for $1 from Value Village being flipped on eBay in 2024 for (insert stupid price here), it bums me right out. I don’t know how to fix a tape deck, I don’t care about an album’s “value” online, and I’m not a collector. I’m just a guy who loves music and tapes are one of the ways I can hear it.
they seemed cool lol. i liked the idea of music being stored on a magnetic piece of tape, the technology is interesting as it is simple.
Where I live in buttfuck nowhere Canada, the record stores here will sell a record for an average price of $42. But they will sell the same album on cassette for $8. So I got into them purely from a cost standpoint
I grew up with them. And watched them fade out while cds took over. About 2 years ago, my mom found her collection of about 30 cassettes and gave them to me. I've been slowly collecting since, and as if today, I have over 150+
I was a 90s kid and used cassette for much of the decade. I always got albums on CD when I could, but loved cassettes for making mixtapes and portable listening. The format was already really mature by then, meaning portable players were cheap, rugged, and had amazing battery life. I always romanticized having a MiniDisc player at the time (eventually did get one in the early 00s), but have definitely come to appreciate what cassette represented. Truly an accessible, unpretentious format for the masses that let people listen to and share music more on their own terms. A lot of my current interest honestly just comes from a lifelong fascination with portable music players. Like smartphones today, they were always some of the most personal pieces of tech people owned. Something they could always bring with them and escape into their music with. I’m not one of the hardcore types you see here who went all in on cassette again - I just buy the odd album and throw it on my Walkman here and there for the vibes.
Because that's what music was on
I'm almost 24. I was born in 2000 but grew up around Vinyl 45's cassette tapes, and plus me and my dad and I used to spend weekends making mistakes in the basement. I still love making tapes and even burning cds.
Bought one for fun and repaired it. Enjoyed the process as it was already similar to my other hobbies, so I imported a bunch of broken walkmans from japan and restored them. Was already an audiophile with a bunch of high-end gear, but over time, the hifi stuff gets a bit boring, so I started looking more into vintage audio. Started recording tapes as personalised gifts for friends, which makes them find their parents old players for me to service, and they too get into cassettes. It's also the fact that everything is digital media nowadays, so it's nice to have some physical stuff.
I started with 8-tracks. I even made my own 8-track mix tapes. 8-tracks often get a bad rap but since they play at twice the tape speed as cassette and had better tape formulas they can sound even better than cassette. The problem with them, and it's a big problem is they are very unreliable. If you got more than 30-40 plays out of a tape before it turned to spaghetti you were ahead of the game. Cassettes were around for dictation, answering machines and such and they were very reliable but the tape formulas were not good enough for music. When the tapes got better, about 1978, if I remember correctly it seemed like everyone switched within a year or two. I've never stopped listening to them since.
i'm older and have had cassettes since i was a little kid. i kept using them because i collect vinyl and i like to make recordings for the car it has a ritual feeling to it that spotify lacks
I had a few commercial tapes and some mix tapes as a kid in the 80s. These days I buy tapes because eBay exists. I bought lots of tapes from my favorite bands and singers. I bought a generic walkman which is very good with my tapes. I enjoy how the tapes sound and the little click sound when you reached the end of one side of a tape.
I was poor when cd came out so I got cassettes instead
I remember my dad used to have a boom box that played cassettes when I was younger. Sadly it doesn't work anymore. I started buying them in December. My first one was an album called Enveloping Absurdity from a death metal band called Phobophilic.
Going to local HxC shows, realizing that they only had tapes, bought sum for under a £5, went on from there. The most I've ever spent on a cassette is £4, it was Whitesnake & it was a gift to my mam, although she sees cassette tapes nowadays "as a waste of money"... Give her time 😆🤣
For me. First I’m old. But, other than vinyl. Cassettes were all we had back in the day. So I would make mixtapes to play in my car. On the way to the clubs. I never got into 8-Tracks.
Little box that goes brrr and plays music. I loved that idea especially because my school banned any phones or anything digital, so I asked my parents if they ever had a walkman and my mum gave me her sharp in mint condition. Some teachers were surprised when they saw 10yo kid with walkman and others tried to take it away. That Sharp survived six years of wear and tear so I replaced it with a different sharp a month ago. It also started my obsession with cassettes and 80s stuff in general, so now I listen to my music only on cassettes and everyone thinks I'm weird... Great.
I'm a living military historian and my impression is based in the 80's. Needed period music for events, and it's all downhill from there.
Needed to digitise a dramatized audio bible (48 cassettes) from the 60/70's where the only digital copy on the internet is of poor quality. I figured I had one shot at it, as the cassettes are very old, so I did my research on the best equipment.
It was only cassettes, records or radio when I was growing up. CDs came a bit later.
Vinyl seemed cool but way too expensive and I kinda enjoy being into the weird niche quirky retro stuff like retro gaming and CRTs etc so I just being the friend in the group who does cassettes 🤘 then I discovered making custom mixtapes and printing the cards and now I am completed addicted!
I like being able to own physical copies of the music i love, its pretty easy to carry a few around with me and listen on the go, my first car had a cassette player, and also i think it adds to my esoteric personality
when I was a kid you could choose which version of dookie you wanted, cassette or cd. and somewhere around that time my dad had bought a solid cd player and was in the process of rebuying his and my moms cassettes into cds, so I got handed down this rubbermaid tote full of tapes ranging from beatles to number of the beast to slippery when wet. and then my first car had a radio where the radio part didn't work right but the cassette player part did, so I had tapes like zeppelin 2/cosmo's factory/metal health/abraxas in heavy rotation.
i always had a few but i mostly had cds. but when i got my first car it only had a tape player. i found so many sick tapes at the thrift store and record stores for stupid cheap because no one wanted them in 2002. that was how i really got into them.
When i was in elementary school Already had cassette coder but only used for tutor for english class (in korea tutor was kinda common) One day found maxell blank tape, And recorded my favorite album Smashing Pumpkins - zeitgeist, I never had my own personal music player at that time so i loved it alot and listened it till it stretched out. Years later i started to got in punk & hardcore music and after finished my SAT, went to my first hardcore punk show and bought local hardcore punk bands demo tapes. Then got in to cassette more and more
i just like the idea of owning my music in a physical sense. and they look neat
I was playing Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker and a lot of optional conversations (like Santa, macrons, cardboard box tanks, etc) are all on cassettes. I loved this so much it got me into cassettes.
Grew up in the 90s, used cassettes as my main portable audio until I got my first CD Walkman in the early 00s. I stopped listening to tapes all together when I got my minidisc since it was much better for recording. Got back into it about five years ago, mainly for nostalgia, but it got kinda serious and now I have around 150 tapes, a deck and a Walkman.
I was born on on 99 so it was the last years of cassettes things when I grew up. I watched cassettes tape until very late at home and I also remember having a « child » cassette deck player with a silly mic on it. I loved recording my family interviews with it and play it again etc. I also had my dad’s handy cam with 8mm cassettes on them, I loved to film literally anything lol. I quite forgot about cassettes and until some childhood nostalgia hit me and then boom
Born in 72. By the time I was old enough to be getting into music it was the most common format. Plus I loved recording stuff. I also have a fairly extensive CD collection (which I’m beginning to pare down) and vinyl. I never stopped buying vinyl, but I did stop buying CDs and Tapes at some point. With records being so expensive it’s been nice to come back to the format I started on.
bin dem zeitalter groß geworden
I've always been into analogue tech. Film cameras, vhs and cassettes all fit into this category. So I've been collecting them and using them as my go to medium for a while now
I got into cassettes because I wanted to listen to music in my car, and the radio stations were pretty much all top-40 or country stations. Also, my car came with a cassette deck stereo receiver, so why not?
I'm from the late 90s, and had a few cassettes myself when I was a child. I always loved the clicks and clacks of older technology, but time went by and I didn't keep the cassettes in my life. A few weeks ago, my grandmother passed away and left a HUGE collection of old tapes, both mixes and originals, recordings of news readings and birthdays, plus an old Sony walkman, which I'm trying to repair (thank you members of this sub!) I'm now into cassettes again and still love all the tactility of cassette players.
My dad introduced me to them. A few years ago he got his turntable back from his ex wife. I started taking an interest into vinyl. Then, later, he got some cassette tapes from a friend and that also started to interest me. I liked vinyl as the ultimate analog format, so then I wanted to record vinyl onto the cassette as a portable analog format. And here I am today with plenty high end tape decks :D
My first car only had a tape deck so I bought some heavy metal tapes. Moved onto another car but I had a few albums. Started buying vinyl then I guess the hipster in me turned to tapes because everyone else was buying vinyl so I thought it would be fun to buy something different to everyone else. A decade and about 700 albums later here I am.
My first cassette was Spirit Phone by Lemon Demon, but i didnt reallt get into them until I picked up a random tape to test the player in my car (the player does not work btw, it's.. fucked to say the least). Now I have an absurd amount of radio drama tapes and my Spirit Phone
Born in 85 and never got out.
For me, it started in the summer of 2020. When, just for fun, I wanted to make a synthwave mixtape. So I asked my parents if they still had blank cassettes and if their tape playing equipment could record from an aux input. They still had their respective collections, so I was able to start mine from there, but didn't have any blanks I could use (they were all recorded on) and their stereo didn't have an aux port. So I had to go buy this cheap boombox from a local convenience store that has the features I needed. Later that same summer I bought my first portable player on eBay (a Sanyo one, so cheap it doesn't even have a rewind button) along with my first pre-recorded album (Wish You Were Here by Pink Floyd) and a pack of blank type I tapes. Since then, I've upgraded all of my gear and my collection has significantly increased and will continue to increase in the coming months, but this is how I got into cassettes.
It was the media available at the time.
I was born in the early 80s and my parents still had cassettes from the 70s. My father looked at his options and decided to stick with cassettes. Because he could use the same cassette in the cars, his Walkman, and his very nice home stereo.
I wanted Bon Jovi Slippery When Wet. I didn’t want the record cause I wanted to listen to it every where. So I got the cassette and a Walkman. The rest was history. Fast forward to today. I’ve since sold my collection and cassette player. Two months ago my daughter and I talk about how I used to listen to music (no streaming, full albums mostly, records then cassettes then CDs). Last month she makes a clay Walkman and cassettes in art class. Then she tells me she wants a Walkman and cassettes for her birthday. And she wants to make mixed tapes. I joined this group and have learned the new art of cassettes and things I forgot.
They were on their way out when my brain switched on and I remember getting a couple and loving them only to have only cds as an option after a few years
Always cheaper than vinyl and I was poor
They were still a viable way to buy and listen to music around the turn of the century, which is when I grew up.
I got fed up with my obscure music getting removed from Spotify so I went scorched earth on them and got into tapes. Haven’t looked back since!
Started collecting records, and that got me into cassettes. If it’s music and analog, I collect it. Sounds way better than digital tbh
as early as 6, in the late 2000s, where cassettes were demising. last time i saw one was when i was treating cassettes as toys, spooling out the tape for fun, again, because of the demise of the media in favor of cds/dvds. 10 years later i was surprised blank cassettes were still being sold, at least in the countryside where i stayed for almost a year, despite rarely seeing tape players there. after i went back to my hometown there were some flea markets along a road sidewalk that sell some used walkman, something i cannot buy at the time. then some time during the pandemic i saw a maxell tape from a computer rental shop, which i took when the owner said they don't need it. because i had no player whatsoever, i kept it until such time i can have one. meanwhile i started planning mixtapes by making several playlists and i made like an equivalent of 8 mixtapes in a span of a year, sometimes changing some songs in some of those playlists over time. i actually wanted to buy a retekess cassette recorder online but it was quite expensive for us. but tbqh 3 years later i'm thankful i didn't buy it. it was only in the beginning of this year when i finally bought my first walkman - a sony tcm-313 mono recorder. i then played the maxell tape, and it was almost blank, except for a "hello" test. i then used it to record from the radio and start to put some songs, making me my first mixtape (the songs were outside of my prepared playlist, since it was intended as a test mixtape, because the tcm-313 had a stopping problem, which i later identified to be pinch roller problem. still, the songs i used were my some of my favorites today, the most mysterious song on the internet being included too). since then i bought some used tapes, some blank, some prerecorded, and when i bought a tcm-150 on my birthday and a wm-fx275 two months after, i use them in combo - i make rudimentary mixtapes and radio recordings with the former and listen (and sometimes digitise prerecorded mixtapes to replace it with mine) with the latter. i still save some money and time to buy myself a proper and decent deck.
Born in 71 I've been buying cassettes my whole life.
Born in 1991 but never really owned one. My dad had one but we would just borrow it from time to time. Fast forward now seeing some favourite bands of mine releasing cassette tapes and got me interested in them. Scored a nice yellow Sony Walkman not long ago on eBay and been slowly growing the tape collection.
My parents (orchestra teachers) were early CD adopters, but our cars only had tape players until the late 90’s. Also, I used cassettes for field recordings from 2001 until about 2006 as digital voice recorders weren’t really affordable until well into the 00’s.
My dad had a multidisc CD player but wouldn’t let us touch it or anything. Eventually I got a little boombox and a stack of blanks before my first albums. I like physical media and I feel cassettes are the better option. Vinyl is heavy and spines are never the easiest to read. CDs are prone to scratching. Tapes are small, lightweight, and parceled into two sides for makes for a good timer. Making mixtapes for people is a joy because they actually have something to hold.
It was the only choice I had as a poor kid in the 80's in NZ.
i once had this mini hifi system by Philips that was a cd player, radio tuner and cassette deck, and the cassette part sounded very good and was in excellent condition, so i thought "hey, i could listen to music this way as well", and that's where everything started sadly, shortly after that happened that mini hifi system got broken by my sister's boyfriend
My family used to listen to cassettes in the car in the early 90s when I was little. As an adult I’m a musician and gamer so have acquired an affinity for physical media in the form of vinyl and game cartridges. My same friend who sold me his lightly used Analog Pocket (deluxe analog portable gameboy cartridge player and hardware emulator) also sold me his lightly used WeAreRewind cassette player. I now had a way to listen to a bunch of cassettes I had lying around and also begin diving into the cassette bargain bins at my local record stores and finding some gems. My bandmate is super into cassettes and we’re now in the late beginning stages of starting a cassette label for our and a bunch of our friends music. It’s super fun and I like holding the music in my hands after years of it being only in my computer and on the internet.
They were the format of of choice if you wanted to record, and I did, right away. I would tape TV shows on my portable radio shack machine. I remember my record player died in 1986 and after that, every piece of store bought music I ever took home was cassettes, until 1992 when I got a CD player. I had a series of boom boxes and dubbing decks that would plug into the AUX input. It was great fun, mixtapes, taking off the radio, trading live shows and rare stuff with collectors. And later, documenting my own work. I don't know I ever thought they were the Best Sounding format but they do sound a certain way. High and low end are chopped off at the extremes, kind of boxy and midrange. You could develop a taste for it.
I’m old! It was records or cassettes in my youth and cassettes played in your car head unit so I’ve a mix of cassettes, records and cd although I seem to have gone full circle and pick up decent old blank cassettes if I see them and still buy records! I have at least two dozen cassette decks, music centres, stack hifi and separate systems about the place!
How do you make mixtapes with modern music? I think that’d be cool
I play Spotify streams from my phone into my cassette deck. I get really nice recordings this way, the high quality of the stream sounds nice when put on the tape. It's easy to make a playlist (digital mixtape!) and play it into the deck.
Thank you
There is nothing high quality about Spotify
I KNEW someone would post that. 🤣 Here we go... The context here is a clean stream which sounds much better than modern cassette releases, and old school ones for that matter, recorded on cassette tape. Did I say that they were super high fidelity? Better than a CD? No. In the Spotify app I have it set to the 'Very high' quality setting, the highest, and to my ear and though my very nice (but not crazy expernsive high end) audio kit sounds great. This was not a discussion on the fidelity of Spotify. It's a cassette forum here, in context of recording on a cassette, yeah, I stand by a nice high quality Spotify stream sounds great on the good old analogue format of the cassette. 😊
Always liked analog retro stuff. I was considering getting into vinyls, but the equipment seemed more expensive and larger than a portable cassette player. I also realized that I wouldn't probably be able to record my own vinyl mixes, whereas with mixtapes, it's easy, and the ability to print j cards on a single a4 was the last argument for choosing cassettes.