@apLundell @maxeddy we (I) didn't have sd cards in the 2002

@rubah @apLundell @maxeddy ye. Also I had a tape only player in my 89 van to prevent radio receiver costs (fck GEZ).

Worked like a charm and was even an improvement over tape recordings.

Used it that often that the first eventually broke (and there is not much that can break in there).

@apLundell @maxeddy I'd call that an iteration of the tech. Thus the triumph was already in hand.

@apLundell @maxeddy

do those have batteries or something?

@deusfigendi @maxeddy The SD-Card-to-tape-deck converters do need batteries to power the processor, yeah.

The much more common audio-jack-to-tape-deck adapters don't need batteries. The current on the audio line is enough to create the tiny magnetic fields the tape-head reads.

@apLundell @maxeddy

That was what I expected, thank you.

Today I like those small FM-Transmitters more. But my current car audio also has an audio jack inside the glovebox.

@apLundell
I love that guy. My personal fave: https://youtu.be/fCWLaAwr3sM

@josh_robusto @maxeddy it has a little electromagnet inside that energizes the tape head using the audio input

@drewcassidy @josh_robusto @maxeddy yeah this requires me to understand how magnets work

@shepardstone @josh_robusto @maxeddy it pretends to be a magnet but it’s not really a magnet

@shepardstone @drewcassidy @josh_robusto @maxeddy There's a type of wire that's covered in isolating lacquer. You wind it up into a coil very tightly, the lacquer makes it so each turn is isolated from each other. You put electric current through the wire, it has to go through the whole length of the wire, but it's creating a magnetic field along the way. The electric current is varied according to the volume of the music, and the changes in the magnetic field are carried over.

@drewcassidy

@josh_robusto
I went through like three of these damn things. They wore out so fast!

@drewcassidy
They were marketed as a way to connect your discman to a car stereo, which is what I used it for until I got an iPod.

@Mildred_Pierce
This warms my heart so much.

@Canageek @maxeddy uhm. I actually had one, or two, of these. 😃

@maxeddy @Cherylb I had one of these and one of the radio type ones. the radio type 1 generally wouldn't work too badly in Canada, but in the US where there is a lot more stations on the radio it was hard to find an empty frequency for long

@Canageek @Cherylb I drove from Detroit to Denver years ago and had to change frequency on the FM adapter about once every hour. It was infuriating.

@Cherylb @Canageek They wore out! I went through, like, three of them.

@keiyakins @maxeddy
I did this in my 79 Mercury Cougar in 2002 - played my 32mb Rio mp3 player through a CD/cassette adapter plugged into an 8-track adapter, plugged into the car's 8-track player.
Glorious.

@Quixote171 @keiyakins That's a gorgeous set up for a true American land yacht.

@keiyakins @maxeddy Jesus christ, the power supply is parasitic on a continuity sensor? D-:

@maxeddy

Also, one time I was driving late on a foggy night with nobody around. This utterly surreal, ethereal song came on that I'd never heard before. Later on when I stopped, I looked at the track listing sheet and saw the title and artist were both blank.

(It turned out that non-ASCII characters had confused my script enough to discard it the entire text. The artist, unsurprisingly, was Björk.)

@suetanvil This is beautiful.

@djsumdog A very real problem for me, too! The throw was so long on my S10's shifter and that didn't help a bit.

@Cyannin Oh my God, where was this when I still had a tape deck @maxeddy @hellojed @amphetamine

@alsternerd oh my god this needs to be in the Louvre.

@bpsycho1 Made my first car (1999 S10) way better, too. I only had maybe four cassette tapes, all of which were just bootlegs of LPs.

@netscaler It just ouputs the signal from the cable onto a piece of metal that presses against the reader in the tape player! It's really clever.

@maxeddy @netscaler it's a record head, just like the record head in a cassette player.