Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with cassettes

How to store/display 2551 cassette tapes?

semacd — Sat, 12 Jan 2013 09:24:29 -0800

My husband has come into 2551 Grateful Dead tapes. He is over the moon. I am less so because they're currently taking up space in 17 boxes in my finished basement and we have virtually no storage space. We would like to store them and ideally display them so he can see what he has. I would like them to be relatively compact and not look like junk. Any ideas?

What was this weird thing they used to have in music stores?

shushufindi — Sun, 11 Mar 2012 08:03:21 -0800

Can anybody fill in the gaps in this memory I have of shopping for cassette tapes in the mid to late eighties? Memories involve a plexi glass wall and conveyor belt contraption used to prevent theft. This morning, I woke up thinking about an experience I had while shopping for music with my parents in the Boston area sometime around 1986-1989. I was eight years old at the time. The memory of this particular store has come back to me a few times over the years. Any help in providing facts would be very helpful.

The way this store sold cassette tapes was odd, and I can't ever remember ever seeing anything like this before or since.

Cassette tapes were placed on these little shelves on the wall of the store. There was a big piece of plexiglass with holes big enough to put your hands in front of the wall separating customers from the tapes. In order to get the tape you wanted, you had to drop it onto a conveyor belt that ran at the bottom of the wall (perhaps there was some kind of packaging around the tapes that made them too big to fit through the holes?). This conveyor belt perhaps lead to the cash register where they would receive your tape and ring you up. This odd set up was supposed to prevent theft.

I believe I bought a Technotronic tape, but I may be wrong. It would seem that this happened sometime around 1986 or 1987, before Pump Up The Jam came out. This music store may have been a Strawberry's located inside of Boston Garden, or it may also have been located in Chestnut Hill mall.

Can anybody tell me about how common this method of theft prevention was? Was this popular all over the country? When did it start being used? When did it's reign end? Why didn't they just put those big plastic things on the tapes to make them too big to put in your pocket? Why didn't they just have them behind glass? Why did they stop doing this? Wasn't this an incredibly expensive method of theft prevention to implement? It must have taken a ton of work to install, then a ton of work to get rid of. Are there any 80's movies where people buy tapes from these things?

Maybe everyone remembers this and there's a name for it. Maybe nobody remembers this and I dreamt it. Any help would be appreciated.

Ccaasseetteess

god particle — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 20:05:31 -0800

Where are the best places to buy tape cassettes in Philadelphia? I know there are a few record stores in Philly, but do these places (or any others) sell tape cassettes? I just recently got a tape player and I'm having a lot of fun with it, but want to find more cheap/obscure/fun tapes to listen to.

Old tapes worth keeping.

typewriter — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 08:19:18 -0800

How should I store these 20-year old cassette tapes with historic value? At some point, I plan to transfer the information on the tapes to a digital format and googling tells me it won't be insanely difficult. I've also read this question/answer but I think I am not comfortable sending out the tapes due to some sensitive content. In the meantime, I want to keep the tapes in the best condition possible so that when I have the time/resources to do the transfer they will be in good shape. The microphone used seems to be quite high-quality, as there is a lot of audio detail that obviously I would like to preserve. In a standard home environment, what is the best storage solution for these tapes?

Help me convert my old tapes and records into mp3 format

Lockeownzj00 — Sat, 12 Feb 2005 17:04:06 -0800

We were rearranging the shelves in my house today, and we found a bunch of old tapes from my
Dad's friends from when he lived in Spain (he was born there, as was I). His friends mixed
a bunch of bands together to make this very cool-sounding tape, and the thought struck me: Why not
rip this? (edit: also found bunch of old tapes my brother made of a punk radio station. woot!)

Of course, I lack the knowledge required.

So my question essentially is: what sort of process, programs, and materials is one required to
go through to convert these tapes to mp3? Would the machine I'd have to buy also double as a
tape-pl-ayer itself? What about records? I've been wanting a record player for a while, and I've
been wanting to rip some records as well. Are there record-rippers which double as players? Are
there record/tape player/rippers all combined into one machine? How complicated is this process?
How expensive does it have to be? I don't want to end up with really badly ripped files, but I
don't want studio equipment, either. Basically, what do I have to go through to get good
sounding, 192-320 kbps mp3s from my tapes and records that I could then distribute via
BitTorrent? Thanks.

Cassette Tapes

gnomeloaf — Sun, 06 Feb 2005 09:42:01 -0800

I'm looking for a music store that has a reasonable selection of cassettes of current release LPs. [+] My husband has a cassette deck in his car, a huge cassette collection, and no interest in CDs or MP3s. While he tends to rely on what he's already amassed for music, there are a handful of newish albums he'd like to get a hold of in his preferred medium. Locally (predictably) he's had no luck.

Metal is the genre of choice, but please feel free to share any resource.

What do I do with my unwanted cassette tapes?

emptybowl — Tue, 10 Aug 2004 06:01:00 -0800

What do I do with my old cassette tapes? [MI] I'm getting ready to move, and went through my old cassette tapes to weed out all of the ones that I already have on CD or on my MP3 player. So, now I have a big box of cassettes that I don't need anymore, but that represent a large chunk of my teenage years. There's some store- bought albums, but most of them are *ahem* "backups" of albums. It just feels wrong to throw them all in a dumpster or something, given all the time and care I put into them. It would be nice to give them to someone, so that they can enjoy them as much as I did, but it's an antiquated technology with outdated music on it. (I checked with my brother, and he was uninterested, but he's a weirdo that doesn't listen to any music.) Anyone have any ideas of what I could do with 200 or so cassette tapes? Hell, anyone here want them?

Car Tape Player

vraxoin — Wed, 14 Apr 2004 08:05:22 -0800

The cassette deck in my car is so noisy that when I'm listening to books on tape on the iPod, all I can hear is the clacking and ratcheting of the tape deck as it gnaws on the cassette adapter. What can I do? [more inside] I gave up on iTrip when I never found a station that would stay clear throughout my commute. Here's the question: can I make this thing any quieter? Or is there some way I can take a soldering iron to my cassette deck (factory 2001 Camry) and turn it into an aux input so that I can go direct?