Collaborate Disseminate
Cassette players and tapes are fertile hacking ground. One reason is that their electromechanical and analog nature provides easy ways to fiddle with their operation. For example, slow down the …read more Continue reading Messing With a Cassette Player Never Sounded So Good
While packing merch for a recent gig, I realised I had the opportunity to do something a little fun. I’d released an album on tape, and spent a little extra …read more Continue reading Wear Your Fave Cassette Tapes as a Necklace With This 3D Printed Adapter
For [ke4mcl], this whole cassette craze of late is not a new discovery so much as it is a personal nostalgia machine. Since [ke4mcl] sees a lot of basic questions …read more Continue reading There’s Not a Cassingle Thing Missing From This Cassette Deck Masterclass
In the early 1980s cassette tapes were the standard storage medium for home computer users; readers of a certain age will remember fiddling with audio jacks, tape counters and signal …read more Continue reading Audio Tape Interface Revives Microcassettes as Storage Medium
It has been a long time since we stored software and computer data on audiotape. But it used to be the de facto standard for hobby computers and [Noel] has …read more Continue reading Audio Cassette Tape Data Retrospective
My DEF CON Safe Mode badge just arrived in the mail this afternoon. The Vegas-based conference which normally hosts around 30,000 attendees every year has moved offline in response to the global pandemic, and the virtual event spins up August 6-9. Known for creative badges, North America’s most well-known infosec …read more
Continue reading Hands-On: The Pandemic DEF CON Badge is an Audio Cassette
A lot of projects we feature use video in some form or other, but that video is invariably digital, it exists as a stream of numbers in a computer memory or storage, and is often compressed. For some of us who grew up working with composite video there is a …read more
Continue reading Full-Colour, Full-Motion Video – On An Audio Cassette!
Vinyl has the audiophiles to keep it relevant, and CDs still have the people who are scared of streaming music, but who mourns for the cassette tape? Yesterday we would have said nobody, but now that [Igor Afanasyev] has unleashed his latest creation onto an unsuspecting world, we aren’t so …read more
Continue reading The Only Cassette Player Worth Owning in 2019
You should probably hope you haven’t seen [Techmoan’s] cassette recorder before. That’s because it is a Neal interview recorder that was mainly used by police to tape interrogations. This one was apparently used by the Royal Navy and was sold for parts. Turns out, the repair was simple, but the teardown and the analysis of the machine — you can see it in the video below — is pretty interesting if you’ve never seen one of these before.
The unit looks like a heavy-duty piece of industrial electronics from the 1980s. Unlike a commercial tape deck, this one is made …read more
As we’ve said many times here on Hackaday, it’s not our place to question why people make the things they make. There’s a legitimate need or utility for many of the projects we cover, no doubt about it. But there’s also a large number of them which are so convoluted that they border on absurd. Not that we love the crazy ones any less, in fact, we usually like those the best.
So when we saw this incredible modification to a Panasonic RN-404 microcassette recorder which replaces the audio hardware with a custom built vacuum tube amplifier, we didn’t bother …read more