A couple of questions about cassettes

I was just wondering a few things about cassettes. Now, I did grow up in the time when cassettes were still fairly widely being used, but not old enough to where I had my own and played them by myself.

Anyway, so I have two very basic questions about these cassette things.

First, of course lots of tape players have recording functionalities. Would a commercial cassette (not a recordable one made for those purposes) be ruined if you hit the record button, at least the part you would be recording over?

Second, what if the two sides are not equal? On vinyl for example, let's say Pink Floyd's "Animals" is 5 minutes longer on Side 2 than on Side 1. Will there be like 5 minutes of silence on the shorter side, since the tape has to be equal for the album to play properly?

 

Hitting the record button with a commercial cassette wouldn't do anything unless you cover the little openings on the top corners of the cassette.

 

Ah ok. But if you were to do that though, it would record over music with whatever is being recorded?

 

Yes, you could record over the music on commercial tape.

 

Yes, it is possible to record over a commercial release if you overcome the protection as mentioned above. The outcomes of ding this were always bevery poor as compared to using a blank yape.

And yes, if one side is longer than the other there will be some blank tape on one side.

I liked tape but always felt it wore out quickly.

 

Sometimes commercial cassettes would rearrange track order to make the two sides close to equal. But I only remember seeing that in earlier commercial cassettes. Did not buy many myself but later cassettes stuck to vinyl/CD order most of the time.

 

Making your own cassette tapes that had blank tape available was the start of "the bonus cut"-- I think.

 

Some cassette decks were able to detect the silence between tracks to allow fancy features like programming the deck to fast-forward to the third song and start playing. Which generally worked as long as there was enough silence between tracks to be detected. Also allowed for fancy features like detecting the silence at the end of a side, then automatically fast-forwarding to the end of the tape, then automatically reversing tape direction to play the next side. So if there was five minutes of blank tape at the end of a side you wouldn't have to actually wait through all of that five minutes, and you wouldn't need to get up to flip the tape either.

 

Most all of my decks have song sensing fast forward capability. I don't recommend using it though as it wears the tapes and heads more rapidly than regular playing.

 

I've seen Cd's that leave off a cut from original double vinyl issues to fit it on 1 CD.

 

Whenever one side was much longer than the other I'd record a song on the tape to fill the gap. I remember that "Go" by Moby (which samples "Laura's Theme" from Twin Peaks) fit nicely at the end of side one of the Twin Peaks soundtrack. I did this so frequently that I sometimes still expect to hear those random songs in the middle of a CD.

 

True. It wasn't (and isn't) advisable to use that feature if you're concerned about tape life and head life. But I did anyways when I had a deck that had that feature. Cassettes for me were a disposable resource. Something to play and enjoy now. Not for archival.

It was a bit of a gamble or adventure to use the gap sensing feature with classical music cassettes. You were never sure if you would end up where you wanted to end up. Classical music doesn't always have silence between tracks. And can even have silence in the middle of a track.