Raspberry Pi Tape Deck for Spotify

because… magic

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Wait, waaat?!
That deck was playing S 8’s - or are those cassettes? (TINY screen here)
and also capable of streaming Spotify? Forgive me if I am not following, but I would be interested in doing that with one of my Pi’s!

Less magic…
(spoiler alert)

Audio cassette tapes really do svck. But I really wanted the playlist to be read from the cassette. Less magic …

Would have been cool if they were able to add a small motor to spool the cassette tape (even with reading the playlist from the NFC

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Would be cooler to use a headphone to audio cassette adapter and a pi zero to do streaming music into an original tape player.

Opinions vary.



https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonevangelho/2016/03/24/forget-vinyl-lets-talk-about-the-cassette-comeback/#4d07ee9e4d71 (I know forbes sucks; maybe it’ll let you read it anyway?)
https://www.forbes.com/sites/hughmcintyre/2017/01/25/cassette-sales-grew-by-74-in-2016/#56d88bb01fd0
(another from forbes; the gist: tape sales up 74% in 2016)

As a kid, I remember adults telling me that trends recycle; what was cool 30 years ago, kids today like again, but adults eschew as “old junque”. Imagine my surprise to find a resurgence in cassette tape interest (folks of my age moved to digital and never looked back at that crap-infested water).
I assume this is how folks ~30 years older than I felt when vinyl had its resurgence a number of years ago.
I imagine there will be some weird resurgence in CDs in a decade or so…
Then iTunes will come around again, making “music crystal” subscribers scratch their heads at “these kids today”…

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Interesting set of articles (even the Forbes). Now I’m really wishing the cassette portion of this project still worked along with adding the spotify server.

(I must admit I thought it was pretty cool what that one band did with releasing a Commodore 64 game on the B-side of the cassette for their album. Fond memories of saving files from my Trash 80 CoCo on to tape).


different thread … interesting no article mentioned quality of sound for the cassette tape / cassette player … I never found a pairing of those that impressed me.

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I do not get the cassette resurgence at all.

As someone who had done recording first on 8-track cartridges, then cassette tapes and finally CDs, the fewer “programs” or “sides” to program into, the easier. The only advantages a cassette player has over a CD is smaller size and they almost never “skip” under motion. MP3 players solved both of those.

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What I found clever was the use of a computer with a sound card in place of a cassette recorder for a classic computer. I have never done it so cannot speak to whether that more reliable than tape which wasn’t so much.

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Their main upside was that of being inexpensive and readily portable. Otherwise the sound quality started out as meh and they steadily degraded from there. A set of batteries on a walkman seemed to last an eternity relative to a portable CD player, however.

I did do some experimentation with recording MP3s to cassette for use in the car, given that I didn’t have a CD player at the time and CD-Rs were pricey, finicky things at the time. 32kHZ MP3s proiduced some weird reverb on the high notes if I recall.

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smashing… I knew it had to have some encoder. NFC would be great for this application.

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Not terribly related but this gave me a flash back to my Atari 400 w/attached tape deck used to store program code :slight_smile: http://www.mr-atari.com/afbeeldingen/hardwarediv/hardware410.jpg

was it in VBR or CBR? what about the channel type, joint, stereo, or mono?

This was circa 1998, so my memory is a tad hazy. Probably stereo 32Khz sample rate at a 96Kbps bit rate. Oh, and it was a very likely a .MP2 file.

ah… yeah I remember encoders at that time sometimes had issues with stereo @ 96Kbps. Not bad for storage or sharing on irc/winmx but not for replaying in audio equipment. Could also been some issues on the tape or poorer quality tape.

Been playing around with mp3 production lately and trying to encode data from a modern computer to the timex so your post got me wondering.

I miss tape drives sometimes.

Its a shame that they’re getting to be almost as expensive as litecoin. Although it would be cool if VCC was able to get our hands on a good tape deck for everyone to have access to.

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