Cassette simulator rewinds digital audio to a more analog time in hiss-tory If you have wistful longings for the days when your songs carried the subtle hiss of the cassettes you listened to, we have some reel good news. A new project takes modern music back to the analog era. The project, available on GitHub, is called "Audio Cassette Simulation" and uses FFmpeg to transcode audio files to get that " …
K7 was the French language abbreviation for cassette. Took me a long while to figure that one out.
Until a few years ago I had a working cassette player. I lost it when the car that surrounded it broke down going uphill on the Autobahn and turned out to be beyond repair.
I did remember to take the tape out.
Can I make the obvious guess/joke as to what was on the cassette you were listening to while you were driving, driving, driving on the Autobahn?
"Wir fahren nicht auf der Autobahn. Wir fahren nicht auf der Autobahn."
"Mein Auto ist stehengeblieben. Ich glaube, es ist kaputt."
"Wir fahren nicht auf der Autobahn. Wir fahren nicht auf der Autobahn."
"Da kommt der Abschleppwagen. Bitte nimm unsere Kassette aus dem Auto, bevor es zerdrückt wird."
I'm fairly sure that a large percentage of people my age (aka old) developed much of their vocabulary (particularly swear words) from dealing with the vagarity of cassettes. The impact on music quality was bad, but trying to use an interface between a primitive PC (I my case a KIM-1) and a cassette player to store programs laboriously entered on a hexadecimal keypad was soul crushing. The odds of success for either writing or reading was probably 1 in 4 at best. Ugh! I'll take a pass on cassette nostalgia.
I just commented elsewhere on the fact that, while I may get nostalgic for many aspects of the 8-bit era, the tedium of loading software from cassette is one of the few things that even the passage of time can't put a rose-tinted gloss on.
I think it depends on your experience. I had a friend who had no end of problems getting the levels "just right" on a ZX80, but then with most programmes well under 1k it wasn't a huge waste of time to rewind and try again.
My Spectrum was a bit better, but still needed jiggling if a particular cassette was "off" for some reason, and with games regularly being 20k or more, the cost of restarting for a failure was much higher.
When I swapped to the BBC Micro, the reliability of cassette storage suddenly leapt up, and on top of that with the thing being recorded in 256byte chunks, errors woul show up immediately and you could just rewind a short way to try that block again.
That said, as soon as I'd saved up and had a profitable enough birthday, I headed down to a show and bought a Watford 8271 upgrade kit and 80 track drive. Bliss! (apart from losing 2½k or so of precious RAM to a raised PAGE)
M.
> My Spectrum was a bit better, but still needed jiggling if a particular cassette was "off" for some reason, and with games regularly being 20k or more, the cost of restarting for a failure was much higher.
We paired our 48k Spectrum with a plain-looking tape recorder that I don't remember the maker of. A couple of tapes needed adjustment but I'm confident that was the tapes rather than the device.
We later avoided the +2 (which a cousin had found problematic) and opted for one of Sinclair's 128+ models instead, paired with a WH Smith Data Recorder. It was similarly dependable, and thanks to the on-board level meter troublesome tapes were easy to identify and manage on the fly most of the time :)
There was a strange phenomena with choosing the cassette player to use on a computer. The thing was that more expensive did not always mean better.
Rule 1. Only use a mono cassette recorder. If you had to use a stereo one, only use one channel, and you may find exchanging tapes with other people difficult.
Rule 2. Get one with a pause button
Rule 3. If using a BBC Micro (or some others that copied it), get one with the microphone start/stop 2.5mm jack
Rule 4. Cue and Review capability was very useful
Rule 5. Get one that allows easy access to adjust the azimuth of the record/playback head
Rule 6. Speed stability and distortion (like clipping), and mains hum will cause you problems, so get one that sounds OK when playing music
Additional factors
Automatic gain control (auto recording level) can be either a good or bad thing. When implemented properly, it can be good. If you can turn AGC off, and adjust the recording level manually, that's even better.
If you can find one that allows you to listen to the signal while playing back, or when recording, that is tremendously helpful.
I bought a reasonable quality Panasonic slim casette recorder back in around 1982. It was around 15 quid, more expensive than most cheap ones, but worth the extra money. It didn't have the 2.5mm jack, so I added one into the power line to the motor. I also drilled a hole to get access to the screw that adjusted the azimuth while playing. I used this very successfully with ZX81, Spectrum and BBC Micro, and it's still knocking around somewhere even now. The WH Smiths Data Recorder was a very safe purchase, having almost everything described above.
I've mentioned azimuth several times. If you couldn't read a tape recorded on someone else's recorder, adjust the azimuth until it sounds as bright as you can, and try again. It normally helped (if you had a tone control as well, turning up to it's highest treble setting could also help). If you changed it, reset it in a similar fashion while listening to a tape recorded on it before you fiddled. If you screw it up, adjust against a commercially created tape. These were normally OK when it came to azimuth.
bought a Watford 8271 upgrade kit and 80 track drive
I got the Watford twin-floppy unit & case (sat over the top of the Beeb and acted as a monitor stand) as well as a sideways RAM/ROM board (had the write-protect switch) and Watford ADFS.
Happy days. Even if I mostly used it for playing Elite, dialling in the BBSes (Almac mostly) and typing stuff up for my dad..
I always thought loading and saving on tapes was a technological miracle
The first real computer I used was a Nascom 1 (late 77 or early 78) with what I think was a 150-baud cassette interface. It didn't really matter about the slow speed since it only had 1k of RAM..
We only had an old cassette player and had to twiddle the volume knob to get just the right level for it to save and load successfully. Get the save volume wrong? You ain't getting that data back..
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In uni we had an assembly-language class using Altair 680s and cassette tapes. Later in the term we upgraded to hard-sectored floppy diskettes which ran through an interface board designed and built by a grad student. He also wrote the firmware and burned the monitor EPROMs.
I never had problems with cassettes used for program or data storage, but I did have a few music cassettes irrepairably munched up. I also recovered a few, albeit with some audible damage, via the use of a #2 pencil and a Radio Shack cassette-tape splicer.
I had the opposite experience between cassettes and floppies. My second PC was an Osborne 1 with 2 floppy drives, and I felt like I had died and gone to tech heaven. By today's standards those floppies absolutely sucked, but compared to using a cassette they were great. Having 2 drives was the real icing on the cake - heaven at last!
I had a friend who had the first dual drive for an Apple II. When a drive engaged in writing it would start with a great 'clunk' sound, which meant that copying from one floppy to another was quite a noisy affair as it apparently could not run drives simultaneously so it was constant cycle of 'clunk' - reading from drive A into memory - 'clunk' - writing to drive B, and repeat..
I don't have cassette nostalgia, but I do have AM radio nostalgia. Driving away from a station and having to adjust the dial every couple of mile at the edge of their broadcast area. Losing the signal when entering a valley, and having to sing or at least hum along until the siglal came back as I drove out the other side. Or having a decent , yet distant, rock station get overwhelmed by some bastards talking about Ole Miss football, Or Tulane football...aargh.
One of the best things about the digital era is being able to put a single song on repeat and listen to it all day long for a full work-week, without having to worry about making another copy.
There was something interesting going on with data stored on cassette, something I discovered when doing this with a CASIO FX 501P and confirmed with a friend who also had a KIM 1 (which I mainly used to play wumpus, but I digress):
The better the quality of the cassette player used, the worse it was for data storage - store as well as playback - especially when it had to be taped on one and replayed on another. Crappy old and cheap mono players would work pretty much all the time, whereas new, shiny "high end" machines were rubbish at it. I didn't manage to borrow a Nakamichi Dragon to go all the way with this, but given the trend I would not have been surprised if that did not manage a restore at all.
I never had time to work out why but it puzzled me.
Mono cassette players were always better than stereo and I always thought it might have been azimuth problems. If a mono signal is picked up by the pair of heads, slightly out of phase and then the signals are summed in a simple stereo to mono lead, this could have caused all sorts of problems.
More expensive players also had better bandwidth but with the typical FSK frequencies being 1.2kHz and 2.4kHz, all that adds is noise, particularly on the cheap cassettes often used.
Dropout was the biggest problem, so it paid to use decent cassettes and for important things to save it at least twice, preferably on different cassettes. Oh, and (if possible) to turn off auto level controls, which many cheaper players didn't have anyway.
M.
I was able to get some commercial cassettes to load more reliably after I heard that copying them to another cassette would (for some reason) improve the reliability. Oddly, it seemed to work.
Maybe the copying removed some high end harmonics or noise that weren't an intentional part of the signals but might have interfered with loading?
Or maybe it's because they were copied onto a higher quality cassette mechanism that was less prone to speed fluctuations? The obvious problem there being that you'd still have to play back the original crappy cassette and the fluctuations would remain on the dubbed copy. But maybe my parents' hifi was better able to handle that than the cheap mechanism in my Atari computer cassette deck.
This is all pure speculation and guesswork on my part, though.
Antidote indeed. My nostalgia is for what I was doing during the time of cassettes, not of the cassettes themselves.
Instead of records or 8-tracks, of which I had both, I could take my music with me. When I got a car, I mounted an under-dash cassette player and a booster/equalizer. Was there hiss? You can't tell if it's loud enough (which explains the constant hiss I now hear). It was better than anything else at the time.
I also learned to program on a Radio Shack TRS-80 Model III. It was great! A dozen years later I was bit by nostalgia and bought one. It never saw any use, and I sold it after staring at it for 5 years.
I used to collect arcade game cabinets - a very fun hobby. Until you move and have to take 5 or 6 cabinets with you. The games were fun, but it was more about the time when they were fun.
This filter is about as useful as the IBM Model M keyboard sound generator called 'bucklespring' that outputs those sounds as you type. Neat, for about 5 minutes, then back to normal.
(and yes, I still have a Model M from 1991, it sits in my closet as I type this away on a GMK67 mechanical keyboard)
Ugh! I'll take a pass on cassette nostalgia
Likewise. They had their place (buy a record, first play involved recording it to cassette. Use tape until the flutter/wow/breakup got too bad, throw tape away then re-record).
Helped stop the vinyl getting damaged (I hated the crackling noises) and, in most circumstances, the environment was noisy enough to not worry about the quality loss from the tape. Even using 'metal' tapes (and a player with the appropriate bias settings) only made it tolerable.
Then came the Sony Minidisc - which was an improvement in that the media was a lot more durable (and didn't have the tendency to get wrapped round the tape rollers if the weather was a bit too warm) but Sony, being Sony, decided to ensure that the functionality was limited by their pathetic attempt at managing the number of copies you could make [1].
And then there was MP3. Encoded at sufficiently high bitrates (and using VBR once it was available) gave sufficient working quality to the music (if you had the storage).
I'll ignore portable CD players - very rare and not entirely usable. I did have a Sony Discman (plus a pseudo-cassette interface for plugging it into a car cassette player) but using it in the car was fairly painful, especially on indifferent rural roads (it didn't handle sudden shocks well despite the damping).
No - nostalgia can stay in the past. Vinyl? Fragile, had to be stored carefully or it got unplayable and inevitably degraded, especially if you couldn't afford the best turntables and needles.
Cassette? Also fragile, quality was poor and the cassettes themselves prone to failure.
Give me music stored in lossless format (ie FLAC), playable on any device that is capable. Especially bought from something like Bandcamp that allows you to actually own the music that you buy & download.
Not at all. Get a PC with a line (not microphone) in connector (which most desktop PCs used to have, although you may have to look inside and connect it up yourself on some more modern systems), connect this to some analogue signal, and load up Audacity. Once you have a digital copy on disk, work out how to convert it to MP3 or how to write it to a CD.
The problem is that most laptops only have a microphone in, and more recent ones expect digital microphones connected by USB.
But you can get USB audio converters that provide line level inputs for a few 10's of pounds if you look around. Also, nowadays, many low end (and some not so low end) turntables (if you're wanting to rip LPs) have built-in A-D converters that attach to a computer by USB.
20 years ago, I ripped quite a lot of LPs using the built-in sound card of an ordinary (original) Celeron PC, although I used a commercial Windows product to do it (the PC was my wife's, and it was conveniently located across the room from my HiFi, and the software did automatic track recognition and allowed you to name the tracks). More recently, I use Audacity and one of the aforementioned USB sound devices attached to my laptop running Linux to rip some 50's swing LPs I had knocking around, for my son who likes swing (quite why, I don't know!)
explain to the readership what an audio cassette actually is, and how they operate
Easy. Get hold of a REVOX A77, point at the reels, capstan, roll and heads and say 'this, but much smaller' :).
The main issue was that the pad that kept the tape against the head introduced quite a few problems, so the really high end ones got clever with motor tension and lifted it away from the tape altogether.
That said, as long as you kept the tape tight (you kept a pen or a pencil around for it) those tapes were quite robust as long as you avoided heat. Or magnets. Or dogs. Or small children..
Possibly.
The battery powered mono ones typically ran on a set of C or D cells, so it's quite feasible that there was a PSU socket somewhere and yes, there was no standard. I always had a bit of tape on the PSUs with the name of the device they belonged to because I very nearly made the same mistake.
Ah. I do remember that some tape players had low voltage inputs. I've never really seen them in use much, except for maybe in a car. But if you had mains input, that is generally what I saw being used.
I don't think I've ever seen a tape player that could run on mains being shipped with a power brick.
That was normally either because of a bad/dirty tape movement, which sometimes wrapped the tape around either the capstan or the pinch roller, or a toddler in the back seat getting their hands on a casette and trying to see how long the tape was!
I lost several of the tapes in my collection because of this (mostly children, I used to clean the tape players quite frequently).
The "loudness wars" mean that a typical digital music file has less dynamic range than an 80s cassette tape did. They have the ability to have massive dynamic range but it is all compressed into a narrow range nowadays.
No ffmpeg filter will recover that lost dynamic range, unfortunately.
> "Data could be stored on it (indeed, we're sure plenty of readers have fond memories of home computers that used the media for software"
I certainly *do* have fond memories of that era of computers, but the tedium and frustration of loading software from cassette itself is something that remains stubbornly resistant to nostalgia even 35-40 years later.
Especially as cassette loading on my Atari 800XL- a fantastic computer otherwise- was atrociously slow even compared to other 8-bit computers. (I had a disk drive, but I also had a lot of tape-only software and didn't get a tape-to-disk utility until later on. That was *so* much better.)
> "Nor can it replicate the heart-stopping noise of tape being chewed up in a misbehaving mechanism. "
Over twenty or so years, I'm sure I can count on one hand the number of times I had the tape come out and get chewed up. Mind you, I tended to look after my cassettes.
I suspect a lot of this reputation- exaggerated or otherwise- comes from people who didn't and (e.g.) left them out of their cases and sitting under the car seat or in the sun, got crap in them, then complained when they stuck or didn't work. The same sort of treatment that would have made vinyl 33s or 45s bordering on unplayable.
This grungeification filter will, I suspect, exaggerate the hissy cliches of cassettes, the auditory equivalent of a "VHS" filter that adds tape noise and damage/dropout lines every couple of seconds. (*)
I'm not saying that cassettes were perfect or that we should go back to them. As good as some of the high-end equipment and Metal cassettes were, I'd be surprised if even those could surpass a very high bitrate or uncompressed modern digital file. And most cassettes weren't anywhere near that good.
Still, they probably deserve a bit more respect than being reduced to nostalgia for a bunch of cliched and slightly exaggerated failings.
(*) I looked at some 35-year-old videotapes recently, and while it definitely looked "VHS' in some ways, there was surprisingly few of those cliche "old VHS" lines. Where there *was* damage it was more overt, lasting several seconds, but not widespread.
I lump this kind of thing into the same category as digital camera filters that can uglify your photos to resemble a Polaroid from 1982. Because that's where four decades of progress in digital media has gotten us: we can now make our recordings seem just as crappy as they used to be!
People like this crap, though. Because people are stupid.
> "digital camera filters that can uglify your photos to resemble a Polaroid from 1982"
I ran some of my photos through that filter and I got back a load of snapshots of a middle-aged couple in the bedroom.
it's called nostalgia. Progress is good, but sometimes it's nice to take a step back along your personal timeline and remind yourself of how things used to be. Whether it's the taste of a childhood food favourite, the sound of a tape slotting into place or a floppy drive head moving from track to track, the smell of a warm CRT, anything that can, even momentarily, give your subconscious enough of a kick to unlock a flood of memories, is something to be cherished, not dismissed so glibly as crap.
Sorry, but how is this news? Audio plugins have existed for years (I can probably just about get away with saying decades, now) in VST format that do this exact thing. Cassettes, classic reel-to-reel studio tape recorders, you name it, it has been done. There have been musical & sound design uses for this since digital audio became a thing.
Is the interesting new thing supposed to be that this has been packaged in a way that it won't fit nicely in the workflows of the people who normally use it? Or that it is now accessible to people who want this but chose not to use a free tool that could host existing solutions in a proper plugin format?
While I'm entirely with you about the plugins - I use tape-themed ones all the time - this isn't really for that audience. I see this more for people who want to add a bit of nostalgia to a recording, maybe for those working in video, but don't want the hassle of learning a DAW, getting plugins for it, then dealing with importing and exporting audio.
This is a quick and dirty way to convert a lot of files at once, it's something you'd use as part of a pipeline. Converting them with ffmpeg is going to be seconds of work, using a DAW is a lot longer.
Top marks to the original authors though, that's some top-notch ffmpeg work going in those scripts.
The "certain age" meaning that any increment on that age is not certain.
All rather daunting now that ⅔ of "The Goodies" have now moved on to the afterlife footlights.
Just recently a I stumbled upon more than 10 metres of cassette tape freshly deposited from a moving car on the roadside - brought back teenage memories. ;)
Obviously there are cars - old enough to have cassette players - being driven by people who have cassttes to play. Curiously until last year charity shops usually had boxes of tapes (which no one wanted) - now they have vanished. Same thing happened with vinyl LPs 10–15 years ago.
There are still plenty of LPs in the charity shops round this way, although good luck finding many that aren't things that your grandmother would have listened to in the 1960s. We've pretty much collected the entire back catalogue of Herb Alpert at an average of 50p a pop, but I don't think we're quite ready to move onto Des O'Connor.
Occasionally, there is a gem to be found; for instance, we picked up a pristine copy of The Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band's "Keynsham" at one point, for only a few quid, ironically, in a charity shop in Portishead. I'm still on the lookout for any Portishead LPs in the charity shops in Keynsham. I'm not sure if that demonstrates commutativity or not.
Unfortunately, all of the big chain charity shops now cherry-pick their donated LPs before they get to the shop floor. They have lists of artists that they know to pick out. These then appear on places like ebay, where quite a lot of charity shops do business. This behaviour coincides with the vinyl renascence.
I used to pick up LP mix bundles of 10 or more online, and used to regularly find interesting disks, but recently, not so much (and I get left with a lot of dross, does anybody want to buy some Val Doonican or James last LPs, or MFP compilations? I have plenty.)
What you can still find is niche artists (like your Bonzo Dog Doo Dah band LP - I found their "Best Of..." a while back) which are not on their list, and slip through. Can be good if you are looking for oddities, but not so much otherwise.
Sometimes junk (rather than charity) shops are a better bet to find LPs nowadays.
Sounds like a crude question that might apply to a UK politician or his policies. The analogy between a dodgy cassette player and UK politics probably quite apt.
Of course your pencil has to have a hexagonal cross·section. I found your standard Faber or red/black Staedtler HB was ideal. I have a feeling that the Staedtlers were sold under another name in AU when I was a schoolboy.
Good Omens' Crowley had a Blaupunkt cassette player in his 1926 black Bentley but as he bemoaned "all tapes left in a car for more than about a fortnight metamorphose into Best of Queen† albums."
† I suspect in AU it would be a "best of Men at Work" album (or Redgum.)
Same reason some people pour inordinate amounts of time and effort into doing stuff like designing video filters to make your pristine LCD, with its perfect geometry, solid expanses of colour etc, look like a cheap 14" portable TV - sometimes perfection *isn't* what you want, sometimes what you really want is to replicate all of the flaws of the original medium as closely as possible, in order to give a more authentic experience of using it.
Whether this is being done for educational purposes, to give a more accurate representation as part of a media production, or just out of a desire to relive the good old days, it doesn't really matter - what matters is that there *are* good reasons for wanting to do so.
Audio cassettes is truly one of those technologies that seems to persist through the generation. Interesting project, should make it easier to integrate this functionality into some random programs unlike DAW plugins. Coincidentally, I have been working on an opposite project to allow audio cassettes / reel to reel to transparently control the playback of digital audio. Think of DVS, but for tapes. See the gift repo here: https://github.com/ns96/cassetteflowJava
Some of my MP3s files already have that tape hiss because I created them from my collection of over 900 cassette tapes.
I bought a compact cassette unit that fitted into a standard 5.25" drive bay and plugged into its own controller card. The software that came with it could attempt to output files for each track but it was a bit hit and miss so I did one file for each side of the tape (It could do both sides without having to turn the tape over) and then manually split out the individual tracks using an MP3 editor. The unit would convert at double speed as well.
The whole reason we had Dolby noise reduction, and the rarer but more effective DBX was to eliminate tape hiss. Granted a lot of car stereos were too cheap to pay Dolby and some labels were also too cheap but there it is. Besides if I want the nostalgia I have a rack of cassettes and a Pioneer dual deck in the stereo stack at home and my children have vehicles old enough to have working cassette decks. I think I also have a functioning Walkman somewhere and I know we have a mini boom box.
Also @Nifty the canonical rewinding tool was a clear plastic Bic pen and us fancy folk had an Allsop head cleaning cassette
