So you could play tapes back-to-back of course. Any decent system could pause the second deck until the tape in the first got to the end, auto-stopped and auto-unpaused the other side. That was an almighty kaCHUNK noise when it happened though so you wouldn’t want to be a light sleeper trying to sleep to music with it.
There were also logistical problems with how you chose to play tapes, especially if part 2 of an album was on the other side of a tape.
Or you spent an absolute fortune on a deck that could play the other side without needing to take the tape out. They didn’t make many of those.
But yeah, I get your point, one side of those double decks could also record from the radio or the other tape. Which is why in some countries taxes were levied on blank tape media to “reimburse” the poor, struggling music industry for the rampant piracy, where curiously, literally none of that went to the artists. Hmmmm.
It’s rather amazing the lengths they went to to make cassettes a thing.
They had some units where they physically spit the tape out, flipped it around, and re-inserted it because they couldn’t tune the mechanism to perform well playing in both directions.
Why again did I need a double tape deck?
So you could play tapes back-to-back of course. Any decent system could pause the second deck until the tape in the first got to the end, auto-stopped and auto-unpaused the other side. That was an almighty kaCHUNK noise when it happened though so you wouldn’t want to be a light sleeper trying to sleep to music with it.
There were also logistical problems with how you chose to play tapes, especially if part 2 of an album was on the other side of a tape.
Or you spent an absolute fortune on a deck that could play the other side without needing to take the tape out. They didn’t make many of those.
But yeah, I get your point, one side of those double decks could also record from the radio or the other tape. Which is why in some countries taxes were levied on blank tape media to “reimburse” the poor, struggling music industry for the rampant piracy, where curiously, literally none of that went to the artists. Hmmmm.
It’s rather amazing the lengths they went to to make cassettes a thing.
They had some units where they physically spit the tape out, flipped it around, and re-inserted it because they couldn’t tune the mechanism to perform well playing in both directions.
Others just flipped the head asseembly.
Well, with music, most recording was record player or radio to tape in the 80’s. The double tape deck mainly came in handy to copy C64 turbo-tapes.
We copied tape-to-tape plenty in those days. Also, how else you gonna cut a mixtape for your gf? :)
I didn’t do that much, because I had disc jockey friends, and it was mostly before the double tape decks arrived.