Talk about cassette tapes or tape recorders to younger kids and they might not know what you’re talking about. After all they were the format that music back in the day came on. However talk about more modern mediums like Spotify, then you might see some recognition in their eyes. Well how’s this for a combo – an old school cassette tape player that can be used to play Spotify?
Well that’s what Matt Brailsford did when he created his own Spotify-compatible cassette tape player. Speaking to the folks at CNET, Brailsford mentioned that the idea for his creation came from the iRecorder, which is an iPhone case that has been shaped to look like an old-fashioned tape recorder.
So how does this work, you ask? Well to modernize the device, Brailsford turned to using the Raspberry Pi computer in his creation which runs a version of MusicBox, which is a module used to identify input and to read NFC tags. From there Brailsford is also able to insert actual cassette tapes, after which the software will then scan the tape for a matching playlist before playing back the music.
Of course given that tape players back in the day didn’t exactly sport the best audio technology (at least compared to today’s offerings), the sound quality coming from Brailsford’s creation is a tad questionable, but at the same time we have to admit it is pretty awesome. You can check it out in action in the video above.
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