As I’ve already established, it’s been a wild year in audio hardware. Wired earbuds are back, MP3 players are a thing again, and CD players are somehow cooler than ever. But as palpable as the hardware nostalgia has been, you’d have to be a Minority Report-style pre-cog to put this device on your bingo card. Introducing: a DIY thing-y that streams Spotify to a cassette. Yup. Spotify on tape. F**k it.
Let me start by saying that you cannot buy this gadget; it’s a hacked-together project from YouTuber Julius Makes—a one-off with no current plans of becoming a purchasable device. With that said, there’s still a lot to love here, even if you may never get your hands on one.
As we’ve already established, this thing takes your run-of-the-mill music stream (I named Spotify, but it could be any streaming service) and converts the digital stream to an analog one. No, not just like any regular digital-to-analog converter (DAC) like this tape-shaped one that I also desperately want to buy; I’m talking about real analog. Once the conversion happens via DAC, the newly analog stream from your music service of choice is recorded on a thin strip of tape and played back via a single speaker.
Why on God’s green earth would you ever want to do that? It’s definitely not fidelity—we have lossless formats, preamps, and regular DACs for that. It’s because tapes just have that—how should I say—je ne sais quoi. They sound… like tapes! Warm, crunchy, washed-out, lo-fi goodness. It’s not how you’d want to listen to music all the time, most likely, but it has a lot more character than your average shitty-ass Bluetooth stream.
On top of all that, Julius Makes’s gadget just looks cool. If you’re prone to nostalgia, especially from the era where tapes were a real thing, then there’s a lot to love here. It has buttons and knobs for recording levels and playback volume, and functions like a tape delay, which is a kind of audio effect that gives sounds an echo-y, nostalgic vibe. For good measure, Julius Makes threw in a quarter-inch audio in and out jack so it could be used just like a tape delay, too.
Apparently, the whole thing was a pain in the ass to make, too, so as miffed as you are about not being able to own one, we can be thankful that someone bothered to make this device exist in the first place. As Julius Makes put it, there was a learning curve, the manufacturing was costly, and waiting for the parts was longer than expected. But hey, we got Spotify on tape out of the effort, and for that, I give this project 5 out of 5 nostalgia-shaped cassette tapes.
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