@apLundell @maxeddy we (I) didn't have sd cards in the 2002
@apLundell @maxeddy I'd call that an iteration of the tech. Thus the triumph was already in hand.
@apLundell
I love that guy. My personal fave: https://youtu.be/fCWLaAwr3sM
@maxeddy once i connected this from my discman to my walkman so i could listen to my cds in the most convoluted way possible
@maxeddy I'm old enough to remember the adapter you put a cassette into then slotted into your 8-track. But I agree.
@maxeddy but really how the fuck did this work
@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.
@josh_robusto
I went through like three of these damn things. They wore out so fast!
@maxeddy ...why does it have a Compact Disc logo
@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.
@maxeddy I still have to use this bad boy in my 05' CRV. My favorite part is having to listen to everything super loud to overcome the "tape" noise it makes 😂
@Mildred_Pierce
This warms my heart so much.
@maxeddy lol memories
@maxeddy Aw, it has a little bowtie.
@maxeddy I once drove from New York to Texas in a car with no A/C, a discman, a copy of of Bjork's "Post" and one of these. It sounded awful. This was not a good technology
@maxeddy
In the year 2018, this is the new hotness!!
You can feed any high quality, lossless audio streams into a deprecated, unshielded, high impedance analog cassette adapter and fuck it all up in style! Kids totes want this(af) for black friday I bet! I mean christmas or whatever.
@maxeddy They worked better then the radio one!
@maxeddy I dunno, there were cassette decks that plugged into an 8track player, and actually drew their power from it. (I know this 'cause techmoan stuck an MP3 player in a cassette shell into one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ppo3IgHWDzA )
@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.
In the mid-late oughties, I'd rip 8-ish hours of Radio Paradise to 64kps MP3s and put them on a cheapass flashdrive player. This thing had three buttons (play/stop & volume) and one LED. I'd leave it in the car connected to my cassette player via one of these and listen to a wide(-ish) variety of commercial-free music while I drove.
And because the player didn't have a display, I kept a printed one-sheet track list I'd generated with a Perl script from the metadata.
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.
@maxeddy Combined with a CD player and a car power adapter, you too can have a nest of wires from the 90s, tangled around your shifter and that causes your music to go out whenever you go into third gear.
@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.
tiredAdmin
@maxeddy They're actually black magic like what even
@Cyannin Oh my God, where was this when I still had a tape deck @maxeddy @hellojed @amphetamine
@maxeddy I had one of those so I could listen to my CD "Walkman" in the car :)
@alsternerd oh my god this needs to be in the Louvre.
@maxeddy I had one of those to use my MP3 player in an old car 😄
@maxeddy i had this in my car. I used to plug my iPod Shuffle to it.
@maxeddy bonus points if the 3.5mm plug then goes into a lightning adapter and connects to a new iPhone
@maxeddy A modern version of this would be the same except extortionate royalties would have to be paid to the manufacturers of the cassette player
@maxeddy
This made my old car (1988 Grand Marquis) way more enjoyable than it normally would've been.
My current ride has a CD deck & no external input tho ☹
@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.
@maxeddy I don't understand what this is. Why does it say 'compact disc' on something cassette shaped?
@Anke It's an adapter for connecting audio devices to your car or home stereo through a casette tapedeck. The casette-shaped device had a tape head that "played" whatever was connected to the stereo jack to tape deck. It even had a looped tape inside!
It says Compact Disc on it because it was originally sold as a means for listening to CDs in a car using a discman or other portable CD player. History!
@maxeddy Thank you!
Yeah, without the CD label, I would have guessed right.
@maxeddy code accumulates so many things like this
i would swear my job is literally making janky adapters like this every day
@maxeddy I had one of those.
@maxeddy
Still using it, old player, good speakers. In my almost steampunk desktop
@maxeddy my first car was a 1999 and this thing saved my LIFE during my long commutes
I will never understand how those work
@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.
it was like using an artefact from a lost civilization's most arcane magical knowledge
@maxeddy
They make converters that have an SD slot and play MP3s.
I believe those are a greater triumph.