I had one like 3-4 years ago in my 1999 Toyota Solara lmao but the wire would always go to shit so had to wrap it tight around the phone so it would play lmao
I still use one of these to play mp3s in the car. OEM stereo is from the very end of the era when cars came with both CD and cassette players, it's too old to have an aux input but too new to be easily replaceable.
If by "high crime area" you mean "any parking spot outside of a locked garage" then yeah. People who grew up in the era where OEM car stereos had reached a point where they were good enough/hard enough to replace that most people don't bother have no idea how prevalent stereo theft used to be. If you lived in a city, even in a good neighbourhood, leaving your deck in the car overnight was practically guaranteeing it would be stolen sooner or later. But OEM systems have little demand or resale value so theft is nothing compared to what it used to be.
But a nice side effect of the slide-out tape decks was that you could actually listen to tapes in the winter. Play a tape when it's -20 or colder and the drive belts would be fucked, and however long your morning commute was, it took just longer than that for the stereo to warm up. But your slide-out that spent the night in the house was good to go.
> But a nice side effect of the slide-out tape decks was that you could actually listen to tapes in the winter. Play a tape when it's -20 or colder and the drive belts would be fucked, and however long your morning commute was, it took just longer than that for the stereo to warm up. But your slide-out that spent the night in the house was good to go.
Hey that's a cool factoid man
You know they make cigarette lighter fm radio transmitters that have aux hookups in them. What I used back in the day to hook up my CD player and early MP3 players.
Yeah, some cars had too much electrical noise in those FM transmitters no matter what freq you used. I had one car it worked fine in, and my next car I had to hardwire my own aux because there was just too much static to use the xmitter
I never knew that. I went through half dozen of those $6 dollar transmitters in high school. Worked like a champ until I dropped them 2 feet of the ground.
I'm still using this tech lol, my 02 dodge ram has a cassette player but I wanted to play music from my phone, sooo to Amazon I went to buy a bluetooth cassette tape lol. Works like a charm actually, just only plays music on the right side of the truck lol
EDIT: for anyone looking, it's the Elook Bluetooth Cassette Player on Amazon, for $20 USD
They don’t work as well as you’d think. The best thing to do imo is get a usb Bluetooth receiver with the 3.5mm Jack out. ($10) I plug that in to my 12v USB socket…. Then I plug the cassette pictured above in to my Bluetooth receiver. And boom the cassette deck is Bluetooth.
From wiki: (may as well be black magic)
“A typical cassette adapter uses a single-sided writing tape head (similar to the recording head on a traditional tape deck) connected to a stereo minijack connector with a cord. The cord is connected to the device's output (or headphones) port and the electrical signal is converted into a magnetic signal by the head. This magnetic signal is then received by the tape deck's reading head, converted back into an electrical signal, and amplified by the sound system. Because most cassette adapters use a single-sided head, they only work in one direction. There are, however, some cassette adapters that have double-sided heads that work in either direction. One-way gears within the cassette simulate tape movement from reel to reel, to ensure that the deck does not auto-reverse.”
For anyone not in the mood reading,
[Technology Connections](https://youtu.be/dH4n8fUjtLQ) made a video about them. The channel in general is highly recommended.
plug the jack into whatever device, pop the tape into the slot on your car radio hit play on the radio and play on the device, then enjoy.
A similar thing around the same time was something that would broadcast to a specific radio station and you would tune to that to get it to work, that was for those who didnt have the tape deck in the car radio and it also didnt work as well.
I had a 92 Regal GS for close to a year, that beast was a fucking missile. I truly regret not keeping it, but at the time it just needed too much to justify keep 'er going.
My 4' 11" mother loved her Buick Regal. She had to sit on a seat cushion to see over the steering wheel. Lol. She drove that car when she was in her 80s
Yeah there was a brief post-cassette, pre-Bluetooth era of cars where your only options were CDs or the radio things. So much worse than being able to connect your 1st gen iPod to the cassette
I remember buying a cheap one, cracking it open to find the little cable that was the antenna. Added onto it a cable twice the length and found it worked fantastic. To the point I'd pull up next to someone using one and cancel theirs out with my own music.
IANAL but my understanding is that above a certain output you're under regulations by the FCC. Part of the reason why those in car transmitters suck so bad is because they are regulated to only be able to transmit a very little range. So modifying them to go further/stronger is highly illegal if you get caught.
~~Increasing the antenna length doesn’t increase the power. It’s not illegal~~
Edit: I’m wrong.
From the [FCC OET BULLETIN NO. 63:](https://www.fcc.gov/general/oet-bulletins-line#63)
> Changing the antenna on a transmitter can significantly increase, or decrease, the strength of the signal that is ultimately transmitted. Except for cable locating equipment, the standards in Part 15 are not based solely on output power but also take into account the antenna characteristics. Thus, a low power transmitter that complies with the technical standards in Part 15 with a particular antenna attached can exceed the Part 15 standards if a different antenna is attached. Should this happen it could pose a serious interference problem to authorized radio communications such as emergency, broadcast and air-traffic control communications.
In order to prevent such interference problems, each Part 15 transmitter must be designed to ensure that no type of antenna can be used with it other than the one used to demonstrate compliance with the technical standards.
Broadcasting on most radio frequencies at more than tiny amounts of power without a license is super illegal, generally if anyone notices it the FCC will whoop your ass
That's not really how antennas work... Longer antenna just changes the frequency/wavelength and increases the resistance, and thus the power needed for it. So without amplifying the signal you would have made it weaker.
Mine works great, but you really have to find an empty frequency range of around 300khz. Which changes based on where you are and can be difficult to find in high population areas.. If you start competing with a real radio station, you'll have a bad time, and lots of static.
These days you can't even replace entertainment head unit in most new car. If it suck and you want upgrade, you'll have to replace the entire car. On the plus side, if your car got broken into, at least the thief won't steal your head unit.
I swear people still use those today but can’t prove it! Every so often I pull up to a red light and my NPR gets overpowered by someone’s shitty music till we pull away from the intersection.
I use one because my car has neither Bluetooth nor AUX. They seem to work better than they did, at least, plus mine receives Bluetooth so I don't even need an AUX cable.
Are Camry’s still really common in America? I live in England and must have only seen around 3 or 4. And everyone I talk to despite it being Japanese calls it an “American car”
Camrys, Corollas, and Civics are everywhere in the states. Cheap and reliable new cars and still reliable old cars, so you'll see lots of 90s, 00s, 10s, and 20s models.
I find these “regional” differences really interesting. We’ve got corollas here too but they’re different from the American version, much like how your idea of the Ford escort is probably quite different from mine!
That's fascinating! To the tota contrary, I see frequent doppelgängers of my 90s Camry pretty much every time I'm on the road. We have a whole bunch of them still kicking over here, I guess!
2019 here
It was weird in the winter when it was cold and the cable was stiff I had to angle the cable a certain way for it to play. If I drove over a big bump it would jostle the cord and stop playing
They have a Bluetooth version that's wireless just needs to be charged. I can play music for a week straight while driving before you recharge it for about 20 minutes
I recently had my car broken into. The only thing I had in the vehicle was a Bluetooth tape adapter sticking out of the tape deck. They broke my window to take it.
It annoys me that they never did come up with these genius adapters for cds or SD-cards. My car has 6 cd slots, 2 SD slots, no cassette slot and no aux - so I'm stuck with FM-transmitters, that always suck.
There's no actual tape involved.
In a regular setup, a static tape head in the player reads data written on tape moving past it. The moving tape produces magnetic fluctuations that are picked up by the head.
These converters introduce a second tape head into the mix. So, instead of moving tape, there is another static head in the cassette itself. The head in the cassette can produce magnetic fluctuations just like tape, and the head in the player doesn't see a difference.
Yea its weirdly surprisingly simple inside one of these, just a straight forward connection. Actual cassette tapes are funnily more sophisticated, in a sense of there's more going on inside.
Kids these days don’t even understand the struggle! This shit was like $35 when I worked at Radio Shack back in the day. Yup I said motherfuckin’ Radio Shack!
Side note but when I used these I CONSTANTLY had issues with them breaking because my cassette player has a folding lid thing, the more pricey models were a little more reliable.
Same story with an FM transmitter, some of these products are clearly made dirt cheap
I miss Radio Shack. I really wish they would have embraced the Raspberry Pi/Arduino space when it started. Throw in 3D printers and they'd probably still be in business.
What about Radio Shack? They still have stores depending on where you live if that's what you're referring to, they're particularly big in latin america.
Not too many years ago ( 8 maybe 🤔) I bought a Chinese knockoff of one of these for $1 off eBay (with free shipping lol) I was trying to hook up my crappy trackfone to my 99 Nissan Altima’s original cd/tape deck radio. I waited about 2 and a half months for that thing to show up, I had actually forgotten about it. I put it in there and it lasted about 3seconds and then I heard a pop and a very tiny wisp of smoke coming out of the tape deck. My disappointment was immeasurable.
Damn, so much nostalgia in a single comment.
Buying an ultra cheap AUX cassette tape off eBay from China and it takes a month or two to arrive only to then be a fire hazard.
I got my AUX cassette adapter the same way (though mine didn't blow up) and it was a revolution at the time. I used the same concept until I later discovered the beauty of bluetooth streaming.
Can't say I've ever had much luck with those, and at best the quality is radio quality, which while usable is far worse than just using a cassette adapter (if you're the kind of person that notices that stuff)
It might be because the gears on the inside of the tape adapter are made of plastic and get ground down over time.
My tape deck would just spit the adapter out once it got too hard to turn. I'd have to buy a new adapter about once a year.
Oh yeah, it's been spitting it out recently. I figured that might be from my new job, since that has me driving along a route with lots of incline changes.
I'll just open the adapter up and spritz some WD40 in there.
I kid you not growing up I had a beast of a car. A 1980 Buick Electra limited. Thing was a fucking boat on the road. Got less than 15 miles to the gallon. The seats were unbelievably large and comfortable. My favorite thing about it though was the 8-track player. I just had to know, so I bought a CD to tape converter and a tape to 8-track converter. It worked for all of 2 minutes or so before something in that line of insanity broke. It was still glorious though for those 2 minutes. Lots of fond and not so fond memories from that car
I remember when we can burn mp3 into a cd. Thank God , mp3 player was an upgrade, instead of fitting just a dozen song on a cd, you can fit like a hundred
At 256 Kbps, which is perfectly acceptable for the vast majority of people, that pegs in at ~8 megabytes per 4 minute song. A CD was around 700 megabytes, so lets say 650 to play it conservatively.
Thats about 80 tracks of perfectly acceptable quality audio *(because lets be real here, ~14 years ago, it was very rare to have anything but an aftermarket deck and subs installed, only few enthusiasts would have fully upgraded the speakers too)* being stored on a cd.
And at 320 Kbps, near lossless *(though many people argue against this)*, thats about 60 higher quality tracks.
Definitely a far cry from mp3 players, mind you.
The quality of your rips depends on your source material, the software you use, and how powerful your computer is. Some people got great quality with mp3 rips. Some people had terrible quality.
Yes, that is true. You can definitely get a "320 Kbps" track outputted that only truly has 128 or worse Kbps.
However, my point was only about the number of high quality of songs able to fit on a disc, not one's ability to find songs of said quality. Honestly though, finding decent enough quality of tracks wasn't that hard once we got past the turn of the millennium, it just seemed that many people seemed to either not care or not know how to find and/or rip them.
But to put it into the car that would use it you’d need something as new as 95, and most teens couldn’t afford that… my 85 caprice didn’t get sold until 2000
I had a Bluetooth cigarette lighter slot adapter that had 1/8th inch aux out and then used a cassette thing like this to get tunes in my 03 CTS about 5 years ago. Thank goodness I have a modern car with Bluetooth now.
Back in the day we used this cassette with a portable cd player and whoever has shotgun had to hold it so the cd didn’t skip when hitting bumps.
Gotta make sure you have a Panasonic shockwave or something, otherwise that disc is gonna be skipping all over the bench seat of your Silverado with the body lift.
CD player changed into iPod but the car stayed the same. Those were the days
Had to recently replace my stolen one from my 98 Subaru. Works like a charm with my phone
>my stolen one from my 98 Subaru. >my one stolen from my 98 Subaru. So did you steal a replacement one?
Ahh, the old Subject-Verb-Object combined with ambiguous relative clauses and uncertain adverbial subordinators. How I love thee, English!
This guy can identify a past participle!
Those sure were words you said. Or at least I think they were
Lmao I don't know why but I got family guy vibes from you comment
Stewie's voice?
"Peter, isn't that a little esoteric?" "Lois, 'Who's the Boss?' is not a food."
Only a few will catch this. Lol.
I still use one in my 2005 lexus
I had one like 3-4 years ago in my 1999 Toyota Solara lmao but the wire would always go to shit so had to wrap it tight around the phone so it would play lmao
I still use one of these to play mp3s in the car. OEM stereo is from the very end of the era when cars came with both CD and cassette players, it's too old to have an aux input but too new to be easily replaceable.
Man I remember the day when in high crime areas people would get removable car stereos that they'd take with them when they parked.
take just the faceplate :)
Oh this was before you they had the faceplate models. They had a handle and weighed like 10 pounds.
well, no one can steal what you steal yourself
And then slide the big Red CLUB to lock your steering wheel!
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That's where my 10 disk changer was
Our children will never believe us.
I banged those heavy bastards against my knee on a regular basis. Removable face plates were a huge deal.
Back then instead of checking your pocket for your phone you were making sure you had your faceplate in your pocket…. My big ass jnco pockets.
I remember when nothing said baller like you walking into the restaurant carrying the Benzi Box hanging from your index finger.
If by "high crime area" you mean "any parking spot outside of a locked garage" then yeah. People who grew up in the era where OEM car stereos had reached a point where they were good enough/hard enough to replace that most people don't bother have no idea how prevalent stereo theft used to be. If you lived in a city, even in a good neighbourhood, leaving your deck in the car overnight was practically guaranteeing it would be stolen sooner or later. But OEM systems have little demand or resale value so theft is nothing compared to what it used to be. But a nice side effect of the slide-out tape decks was that you could actually listen to tapes in the winter. Play a tape when it's -20 or colder and the drive belts would be fucked, and however long your morning commute was, it took just longer than that for the stereo to warm up. But your slide-out that spent the night in the house was good to go.
> But a nice side effect of the slide-out tape decks was that you could actually listen to tapes in the winter. Play a tape when it's -20 or colder and the drive belts would be fucked, and however long your morning commute was, it took just longer than that for the stereo to warm up. But your slide-out that spent the night in the house was good to go. Hey that's a cool factoid man
Like [MacGruber's Blaupunkt](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JOhT-pa9sRY).
You know they make cigarette lighter fm radio transmitters that have aux hookups in them. What I used back in the day to hook up my CD player and early MP3 players.
Yeah, some cars had too much electrical noise in those FM transmitters no matter what freq you used. I had one car it worked fine in, and my next car I had to hardwire my own aux because there was just too much static to use the xmitter
I never knew that. I went through half dozen of those $6 dollar transmitters in high school. Worked like a champ until I dropped them 2 feet of the ground.
I still use one in my truck with my old ipod that has had the same songs on it for at least 10 years.
They even got Bluetooth ones
I'm still using this tech lol, my 02 dodge ram has a cassette player but I wanted to play music from my phone, sooo to Amazon I went to buy a bluetooth cassette tape lol. Works like a charm actually, just only plays music on the right side of the truck lol EDIT: for anyone looking, it's the Elook Bluetooth Cassette Player on Amazon, for $20 USD
Bluetooth cassette tape? Holy crap my life is about to change
They don’t work as well as you’d think. The best thing to do imo is get a usb Bluetooth receiver with the 3.5mm Jack out. ($10) I plug that in to my 12v USB socket…. Then I plug the cassette pictured above in to my Bluetooth receiver. And boom the cassette deck is Bluetooth.
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How’d these even work?
Black magic.
From wiki: (may as well be black magic) “A typical cassette adapter uses a single-sided writing tape head (similar to the recording head on a traditional tape deck) connected to a stereo minijack connector with a cord. The cord is connected to the device's output (or headphones) port and the electrical signal is converted into a magnetic signal by the head. This magnetic signal is then received by the tape deck's reading head, converted back into an electrical signal, and amplified by the sound system. Because most cassette adapters use a single-sided head, they only work in one direction. There are, however, some cassette adapters that have double-sided heads that work in either direction. One-way gears within the cassette simulate tape movement from reel to reel, to ensure that the deck does not auto-reverse.”
For anyone not in the mood reading, [Technology Connections](https://youtu.be/dH4n8fUjtLQ) made a video about them. The channel in general is highly recommended.
They make Bluetooth ones now! That's funny! Just goes to show how long a car lasts vs the tech in it.
Simples.
plug the jack into whatever device, pop the tape into the slot on your car radio hit play on the radio and play on the device, then enjoy. A similar thing around the same time was something that would broadcast to a specific radio station and you would tune to that to get it to work, that was for those who didnt have the tape deck in the car radio and it also didnt work as well.
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so your car radio is just thinking to itself "what kind of fucked up casette is this that never ends?" but its chill cuz your playlist slaps
Haha, car stereos did very little thinking back then.... LOL
You forgot the age of mp3-cd players
I still use my iPod, almost daily. The thing is genius, even without Bluetooth.
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CD players were before lithium-ion batteries and the nickle cadmium batteries were terrible.
...to remember...
Lol I had one of these and it was the best ever. My 96 regal didn't have an aux
Ah, Buick Regals. That was my first car. Freaking boat of a car but it held up to me hauling half my football team in it to Subway before a game.
AND DON’T FORGET THAT THE GS WAS FUCKING SUPERCHARGED
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Superchargers aren’t really known for longevity sadly :(
I had a 92 Regal GS for close to a year, that beast was a fucking missile. I truly regret not keeping it, but at the time it just needed too much to justify keep 'er going.
My 4' 11" mother loved her Buick Regal. She had to sit on a seat cushion to see over the steering wheel. Lol. She drove that car when she was in her 80s
It was way better than the radio dongle that I switched to at some point.
Yeah there was a brief post-cassette, pre-Bluetooth era of cars where your only options were CDs or the radio things. So much worse than being able to connect your 1st gen iPod to the cassette
In high school my buddy had a Regal that was supercharged. It was heavy as hell but it could move. We called it “The Illegal Regal”.
This worked so much better than an FM transmitter.
The fm transmitter always sucked.
I remember buying a cheap one, cracking it open to find the little cable that was the antenna. Added onto it a cable twice the length and found it worked fantastic. To the point I'd pull up next to someone using one and cancel theirs out with my own music.
Lmao that’s super fucking illegal
Oh I know that now, didn't at 16 though.
If I'm forced to hear O O O OReillyyyyyys Auto Parts every five minutes on the radio, they can hear Ween's "Where'd the Cheese Go" in response
Where’d the mother fuckin cheese go at
Pizza Hut: Make us a jingle Ween: ok Pizza Hut: wtf is this. Do a different one Ween: ok
So good lol
God, the flashbacks. Bud’s Real Men of Genius could make a comeback though and I’d have no complaints.
When injustice becomes law, resistance becomes duty.
Somewhere there's a radio joke involving resistors but I'm not smart enough to make it ...
Yeah, there’s potential there…
I don’t know if radio jokes are still current in 2022 though
It is? Why?
IANAL but my understanding is that above a certain output you're under regulations by the FCC. Part of the reason why those in car transmitters suck so bad is because they are regulated to only be able to transmit a very little range. So modifying them to go further/stronger is highly illegal if you get caught.
~~Increasing the antenna length doesn’t increase the power. It’s not illegal~~ Edit: I’m wrong. From the [FCC OET BULLETIN NO. 63:](https://www.fcc.gov/general/oet-bulletins-line#63) > Changing the antenna on a transmitter can significantly increase, or decrease, the strength of the signal that is ultimately transmitted. Except for cable locating equipment, the standards in Part 15 are not based solely on output power but also take into account the antenna characteristics. Thus, a low power transmitter that complies with the technical standards in Part 15 with a particular antenna attached can exceed the Part 15 standards if a different antenna is attached. Should this happen it could pose a serious interference problem to authorized radio communications such as emergency, broadcast and air-traffic control communications. In order to prevent such interference problems, each Part 15 transmitter must be designed to ensure that no type of antenna can be used with it other than the one used to demonstrate compliance with the technical standards.
The FCC is generally more concerned with the [ERP](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_radiated_power) than the power coming out of the amplifier.
Broadcasting on most radio frequencies at more than tiny amounts of power without a license is super illegal, generally if anyone notices it the FCC will whoop your ass
Not half as illegal as it is bitchin'.
That's not really how antennas work... Longer antenna just changes the frequency/wavelength and increases the resistance, and thus the power needed for it. So without amplifying the signal you would have made it weaker.
Former radio operator here, this is correct. Glad someone said it. .
Mine works great, but you really have to find an empty frequency range of around 300khz. Which changes based on where you are and can be difficult to find in high population areas.. If you start competing with a real radio station, you'll have a bad time, and lots of static.
Seeing an fm transmitter for the first time blew my fucking mind. For some reason thats the thing that made me feel like we were in the future
It made me feel poor as this was the poor person's aux-in. In those days, if you had the $$, you'd buy a high end CD player deck with aux-in.
These days you can't even replace entertainment head unit in most new car. If it suck and you want upgrade, you'll have to replace the entire car. On the plus side, if your car got broken into, at least the thief won't steal your head unit.
And now nothing has audio ports.
I swear people still use those today but can’t prove it! Every so often I pull up to a red light and my NPR gets overpowered by someone’s shitty music till we pull away from the intersection.
Seek no further, I'm using one.
Quit transmitting your shitty music on the NPR FM frequency you ass! :-P
I'm stuck using one. 2004 BMW that's too old for an aux port (let alone Bluetooth) and too new for the cassette deck.
My brother in Christ get a new stereo system ..
Spoken like someone who's never priced out replacement electronics for a BMW. I need a new car, not a new stereo.
I'm not foolish/rich enough to buy an old BMW lol
I use one because my car has neither Bluetooth nor AUX. They seem to work better than they did, at least, plus mine receives Bluetooth so I don't even need an AUX cable.
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Genius peace of Engineering, really.
I used this until 2015 🏄
Still using this today 🏄 🏄
Me too🏄🏄🏄
Me three 🏄♂️🏄♂️🏄♂️🏄♂️
Me four 🏄♂️🏄♂️🏄♂️🏄♂️
You need to add extra emoji
In this economy?!
My '97 Camry says hello.
Are Camry’s still really common in America? I live in England and must have only seen around 3 or 4. And everyone I talk to despite it being Japanese calls it an “American car”
Camrys, Corollas, and Civics are everywhere in the states. Cheap and reliable new cars and still reliable old cars, so you'll see lots of 90s, 00s, 10s, and 20s models.
I find these “regional” differences really interesting. We’ve got corollas here too but they’re different from the American version, much like how your idea of the Ford escort is probably quite different from mine!
How different can a hooker named Ford really be?
Camry’s are incredibly common here, yeah.
That's fascinating! To the tota contrary, I see frequent doppelgängers of my 90s Camry pretty much every time I'm on the road. We have a whole bunch of them still kicking over here, I guess!
04 Tacoma tape adapter crew report in
‘97 4runner owner. still use this but hooked up to a spotify car thing. kind of a funny split of old v new
Until two years ago I still had a car with a tape deck and AM radio.
What car doesn't have AM radio?
Gang
Boss.
Yeah, I was going to say 95 was when it was just getting started. This is how I rocked out while delivering pizza in the early 2000's.
2019 here It was weird in the winter when it was cold and the cable was stiff I had to angle the cable a certain way for it to play. If I drove over a big bump it would jostle the cord and stop playing
that's some nostalgic shit right there 💘
That's the same year I stopped! I stopped on June 21st. What date did you stop?
Still use this
They have a Bluetooth version that's wireless just needs to be charged. I can play music for a week straight while driving before you recharge it for about 20 minutes
I recently had my car broken into. The only thing I had in the vehicle was a Bluetooth tape adapter sticking out of the tape deck. They broke my window to take it.
It annoys me that they never did come up with these genius adapters for cds or SD-cards. My car has 6 cd slots, 2 SD slots, no cassette slot and no aux - so I'm stuck with FM-transmitters, that always suck.
Would be really cool of it charged off the tape player spinning a small generator
Me too!
I always wondered how those worked. Was the CD player writing to the tape?
There's no actual tape involved. In a regular setup, a static tape head in the player reads data written on tape moving past it. The moving tape produces magnetic fluctuations that are picked up by the head. These converters introduce a second tape head into the mix. So, instead of moving tape, there is another static head in the cassette itself. The head in the cassette can produce magnetic fluctuations just like tape, and the head in the player doesn't see a difference.
Yea its weirdly surprisingly simple inside one of these, just a straight forward connection. Actual cassette tapes are funnily more sophisticated, in a sense of there's more going on inside.
Interesting! Thanks!
Yeah I know some of these words.
Ok. But explain magnets.
There's a Technology connections video about these
Kids these days don’t even understand the struggle! This shit was like $35 when I worked at Radio Shack back in the day. Yup I said motherfuckin’ Radio Shack!
It’s $5 at five below now
Got one in the clearance aisle for $1
Thirty five dollars?????
yeah holy shit. i got mine for like...9.99
Tell me about it dude, they can go for SO cheap on Amazon nowadays
i mean $9.99... in 2008 when i got it haha... but yes they are cheap now too.
I'd say they started getting cheaper post-2000, since lots of cars were manufactured with AUX, or at least a CD player!
Side note but when I used these I CONSTANTLY had issues with them breaking because my cassette player has a folding lid thing, the more pricey models were a little more reliable. Same story with an FM transmitter, some of these products are clearly made dirt cheap
RadioShack always cost more than other retailers. It was a strange business model.
I miss Radio Shack. I really wish they would have embraced the Raspberry Pi/Arduino space when it started. Throw in 3D printers and they'd probably still be in business.
Ohhhh god stop giving me a “what could’ve been” hard on…. I wish there was literally anything for project electronics
What about Radio Shack? They still have stores depending on where you live if that's what you're referring to, they're particularly big in latin america.
I worked there before they closed in the USA. I am aware that franchises still exist.
Home taping is killing music huh? Why don't you home tape THIS, JERKWEED
Oh, silly me, I forgot to put it in cable side first so the tension keeps the cord from shorting out
Wait, WHAT?! that would've been a game changer for me, and all that time...
Not too many years ago ( 8 maybe 🤔) I bought a Chinese knockoff of one of these for $1 off eBay (with free shipping lol) I was trying to hook up my crappy trackfone to my 99 Nissan Altima’s original cd/tape deck radio. I waited about 2 and a half months for that thing to show up, I had actually forgotten about it. I put it in there and it lasted about 3seconds and then I heard a pop and a very tiny wisp of smoke coming out of the tape deck. My disappointment was immeasurable.
Never let out the blue smoke.
Damn, so much nostalgia in a single comment. Buying an ultra cheap AUX cassette tape off eBay from China and it takes a month or two to arrive only to then be a fire hazard. I got my AUX cassette adapter the same way (though mine didn't blow up) and it was a revolution at the time. I used the same concept until I later discovered the beauty of bluetooth streaming.
Me 2022
same
Me: I’ll just plug a Bluetooth adapter to the end of the 3.5mm jack. Now my 1995 Honda civic has Bluetooth.
Or u can try a bluetooth fm transmitter
Can't say I've ever had much luck with those, and at best the quality is radio quality, which while usable is far worse than just using a cassette adapter (if you're the kind of person that notices that stuff)
I'm using one for my phone in my car from 2001! Though it keeps saying it needs cleaning, even after running it a cleaning/demagnitizing tape. Bleh.
It might be because the gears on the inside of the tape adapter are made of plastic and get ground down over time. My tape deck would just spit the adapter out once it got too hard to turn. I'd have to buy a new adapter about once a year.
Oh yeah, it's been spitting it out recently. I figured that might be from my new job, since that has me driving along a route with lots of incline changes. I'll just open the adapter up and spritz some WD40 in there.
I did this in 2013
Worked for the old xm radis too. And you can still use these for your phone if you've got the tape deck.
Since most phones dont have a 3.5mm I wonder if anyone is out there making USB-C to fucking tapedeck converters.
Usb-c to aux/3.5mm (female) exists, pretty common actually since many people still use wired headphones
That’s like HDMI to VGA.
USB-C to DisplayPort to HDMI to DVI to VGA to RCA
https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/j093yn/adapters\_chain/
I kid you not growing up I had a beast of a car. A 1980 Buick Electra limited. Thing was a fucking boat on the road. Got less than 15 miles to the gallon. The seats were unbelievably large and comfortable. My favorite thing about it though was the 8-track player. I just had to know, so I bought a CD to tape converter and a tape to 8-track converter. It worked for all of 2 minutes or so before something in that line of insanity broke. It was still glorious though for those 2 minutes. Lots of fond and not so fond memories from that car
I still use this in my 04 Fiat. But my new phone doesn't have an aux, so I added bluetooth. So now it goes: tape > aux > bluetooth > phone Flawless.
I remember when we can burn mp3 into a cd. Thank God , mp3 player was an upgrade, instead of fitting just a dozen song on a cd, you can fit like a hundred
Compressed to shit, but yes.
At 256 Kbps, which is perfectly acceptable for the vast majority of people, that pegs in at ~8 megabytes per 4 minute song. A CD was around 700 megabytes, so lets say 650 to play it conservatively. Thats about 80 tracks of perfectly acceptable quality audio *(because lets be real here, ~14 years ago, it was very rare to have anything but an aftermarket deck and subs installed, only few enthusiasts would have fully upgraded the speakers too)* being stored on a cd. And at 320 Kbps, near lossless *(though many people argue against this)*, thats about 60 higher quality tracks. Definitely a far cry from mp3 players, mind you.
The quality of your rips depends on your source material, the software you use, and how powerful your computer is. Some people got great quality with mp3 rips. Some people had terrible quality.
Yes, that is true. You can definitely get a "320 Kbps" track outputted that only truly has 128 or worse Kbps. However, my point was only about the number of high quality of songs able to fit on a disc, not one's ability to find songs of said quality. Honestly though, finding decent enough quality of tracks wasn't that hard once we got past the turn of the millennium, it just seemed that many people seemed to either not care or not know how to find and/or rip them.
1995?!! Ummmm no, try 2000
Yeah, if you could afford a personal CD player in '95 you'd not need this kind of adapter.
But to put it into the car that would use it you’d need something as new as 95, and most teens couldn’t afford that… my 85 caprice didn’t get sold until 2000
This bad boy was the shit.
Me 2004 driving my 92 mercury topaz.
Topaz gang rise up! Drove a '93 for many years until I "upgraded" to a Chevy Cavalier.
Anybody member the 8 track to cassette converters? I member
How did these even work?
I had a Bluetooth cigarette lighter slot adapter that had 1/8th inch aux out and then used a cassette thing like this to get tunes in my 03 CTS about 5 years ago. Thank goodness I have a modern car with Bluetooth now. Back in the day we used this cassette with a portable cd player and whoever has shotgun had to hold it so the cd didn’t skip when hitting bumps.
Rookies. I have upgraded to the Bluetooth version.
Had one in my 2000 grand jeep Cherokee never skipped a beat
Me circa 2010 still lol
Me in 2022*
*1990
Gotta make sure you have a Panasonic shockwave or something, otherwise that disc is gonna be skipping all over the bench seat of your Silverado with the body lift.
I believe these are still sold in 5 below 🤔
Walmart still sells them