MP3 player looks like a cassette, is a cassette
Reel-to-real
During the 1980s something called the cassette was a popular recording format. Apparently. In the MP3 era, the analogue format's long forgotten, but it's coming back, thanks to this novel MP3 player.
The MP3 cassette is half MP3 player and half real cassette
The gadget may look like one of those mix tapes you gave to Sarah Hedges in class 11b, but it actually can take SD memory cards of up to 2GB. This allows you to take full advantage of modern storage formats - and use an MP3 player that looks like a retro cassette.
It's really reel
A 3.5mm headphone jack is built into the ‘cassette’ and a USB 2.0 port also means you won’t have to stick a pencil into either reels’ hole to wind up that pesky tape pulled out by your twin-deck tape recorder. Buttons on the player let you select tracks and adjust the volume.
But the best hidden feature of this… er… wondrous gadget is that it’s actually a real cassette. So can slot the cassette directly into your Mini Metro’s tape player and listen to it through the car radio.
The Stand Alone or Car Cassette MP3 player is available now online for $40 (£20/€25). If you’ve really got love for the 1980s, then you may also want to consider the giant cassette bag to carry the player in too.
COMMENTS
Could be handy
I'm currently burning podcasts to cheap CDs and playing them in a CD player with output connected to input of a tape deck and recording so I can listen to them in my car. Partly because I'm too cheap to buy a CD player or MP3 player and adapter, partly because high heat and sunlight will destroy recordable discs.
Cassette love
I just bought a cassette adapter with composite lead and 3.5mm plug for my 2005 Merc c230 Kompressor... works a treat. If I'd know about this before I'd have bought one, saves the MP3 player... come to think of it, I might get one anyway...
I'll get my Crombie-coat, my best cassette years were in the late 1960's and early 1970's delivering newspapers with my cassette on the rack on the bike of my bike.
@ David Gosnell
I have to completely disagree with your assessment of the old cassette converters. I wish I still had a tape deck in my car so I could make use of them again, they were wonderful, basically turning your car stereo into a universally compatible amp. I never found auto-rewind a problem (it never kicked in because the 'tape' never ran out, maybe your adaptor had a sticky reel causing it to make the car think it had reached the end of the tape) and the sound quality was, whilst not your 256Kps (or whatever), as good as any genuine tape and when actually driving the road noise made a mockery of any quality anyway.
These crappy 'jack in to a radio frequency' devices they have these days are twice as expensive as cassette adaptors ever were, are interrupted by even the weakest local radio station and have to be re-tuned every 100 miles anyway. If the batteries last. Which they don't, and I hate having bloody trailing wires from cigarette lighter everywhere.
Yes, I would love one of those stereos that had a jack in, but frankly I can't afford a new car stereo. I guess I just miss the nineties.
Mine's the one with the rolled up sleeves and 'NAFNAF' on the back.
Rewind
It'd be sweeter if it worked the other way round.
I.e. if it could /record/ mp3s. Then you could simply press record+play on either a twin tape deck or a tape deck hooked up to turntable for one last blast of analogue nostalgia before dropping the resultant mp3s onto yer hard drive.
Better than plugging the tape player or turntable into the PC line in and then fannying around with Audacity or similar. And more likely to happen, too. Has /anyone/ got round to the never-gonna-happen job of mp3/jpeg/mpeg-ising their tapes/records/photos/VHS)?
I've not even done half of my CDs yet to be honest.
@WTF
"How are you meant to push any of those buttons if the thing is actually in use?"
If it were clever, it would look at the spool rotation speed and direction, and would move forward or backwards in the playlist when you press fast forward or rewind!
If it were cleverer, it would generate its own power from those spool rotations too.
