Compact Cassette Tapes Art Reproduction Website

[meyer980]

Hey all, a lot of people around here know I enjoy doing artwork layout and reproduction. I've been helping out with that for some people in a new hobby of mine: cassette tapes

I learned the community doesn't really have a place to find that type of stuff other than manually browsing their forums so I built a website for it:

https://tapeartrepros.sergiostuff.com/

If that kind of thing interest you, check it out! You'll find high quality reproductions of j-cards, labels, and packaging with contributions from myself and others. It's only been up for 5 days but adding more all the time!

[RandyT]

Very nice looking site, and I'm seriously not knocking the effort, but I can't help but ask the question as to why there is a demand for cassette tape images?  If someone told me that there is a preservation community for that format, I think my head might explode as it is easily the worst possible consumer media for music reproduction and was basically invented to fill the need for portability when there weren't other options.  Even the venerable 8-track was better in that regard, if not without it's own demons.

But as usual, I'm probably just missing something

[danny_galaga]

Very nice looking site, and I'm seriously not knocking the effort, but I can't help but ask the question as to why there is a demand for cassette tape images?  If someone told me that there is a preservation community for that format, I think my head might explode as it is easily the worst possible consumer media for music reproduction and was basically invented to fill the need for portability when there weren't other options.  Even the venerable 8-track was better in that regard, if not without it's own demons.

But as usual, tv I'm probably just missing something

Nostalgia?

[meyer980]

Very nice looking site, and I'm seriously not knocking the effort, but I can't help but ask the question as to why there is a demand for cassette tape images?  If someone told me that there is a preservation community for that format, I think my head might explode as it is easily the worst possible consumer media for music reproduction and was basically invented to fill the need for portability when there weren't other options.  Even the venerable 8-track was better in that regard, if not without it's own demons.

But as usual, I'm probably just missing something

Haha if you're looking for a *practical* reason, absolutely none. For me it hits many of the same joy points as the arcade hobby. Some level of nostalgia, owning and fixing something I only dreamed about as a kid, and the physicality of it. Definitely not looking for the best sound quality - but the *act* of trying to get the best possible sound out of your hardware is still fun. And it's a level of technical repair that's fairly easy as an entry point (replacing belts, bulbs, adjusting levels etc. isn't very hard) but gives you a feeling of accomplishment. I rarely put a tape in and play through a full album, I have much better methods for that. But tinkering is still fun.

That's what I'm in it for anyway. And hell, while I've got the equipment, might as well record a mix tape. And if I'm gonna make a mix tape, it's gonna need a high quality, clean, vector j-card!

I can't contribute much to the community from a technical knowledge standpoint but I'm good at art layout and vector work so figured it was one way I could give back.

[RandyT]

I can see that from a restoration/preservation angle.  Thanks for the elucidation 

Back in the day, I had a pricey Dolby noise reduction component, which got rid of the hiss if you didn't mind the compression artifacting and muddier sound.  You basically had to use the metal tape formulation and record through the Dolby component to get anything decent from it, which made the tapes sound pretty bad on a normal player.  I don't miss those days, but the mechanical bits in some of the higher-end players were definitely interesting (and insanely expensive).  I guess if one spends a bunch of time restoring an expensive unit which physically flips the tape, that same person would want a nice-looking tape for it to flip.