Tape recoding

[sam_h]

I was wondering whether of not i would be able to increase the speed of the motor of a cassette recorder so that i record music from my computer to tape a lot quicker then real time. I want to make compelation cassesttes to listen to in my car but I'm inpatientent, so faster recordings would be useful for me.

Any ideas or comments will be useful.

 

[tansis]

you could do it that way but the playback quality is going to suffer and the tape is in danger of stretching, commercial copies using magnetic tape are done by a "hot" contact method it's fast but you still need a master tape.

Would suggest going digital, portable MP3 players are coming down in price and a few forward thinking individuals are using old second hand pc's reboxed with new power supplies to store and playback audio in cars.

Try looking around for a cheap laptop computer , I use an old Dell as the core of my home system ( 300 Mhz / 128Mb ram / 5Gb hard drive )
With twenty tracks at cd quality occupying less than 40mb (uncompressed wave format) , CD-r/w media holds 650 to 700 Mb. On average it takes what? say three minutes to copy a cd and twelve to fifteen to burn one depending on hardware.

 

[Dean Huster]

Cassettes

Of course, Sam, if you're like me, you have a cassette player in every car and several in the house and barely have the option of playing a CD, let alone MP3 stuff.

High speed cassette duplicators made by companies such as Telex and 3M can dupe a C-60 cassette in 2 or 3 minutes, recording the duplicates and running the master at speeds approaching the rewind speed of el cheapo cassette players, doing both sides at the same time. The resulant copies may not be the best, but they aren't bad. The duplicators are used all the time by churches and training organizations.

Doing it with a regular cassette deck? Not easy. There are some dual decks out there that will dub at 2x speed with a slight loss in the highs. Your problem is that the frequency response of the heads has to be astronomical when you do higher speeds or you lose the highs. For instance, if a recorder normally can handle 11KHz with no problems, if you try using it at 5X for faster duplicating, it'll have to handle 55KHz everywhere -- in the playback heads, record heads and all the electronics. Most recorders' amplifiers have limited frequency response and their heads are much worse, so there'll be problems. If the cassettes are voice only, you have a better chance of making useable dupes, where the highs don't go much over 3KHz.

Dean