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90sTimeMachine is offering a blast from the past with its DIY Cassette Kit, giving you everything you need to make the perfect mixtape—and helps to preserve your music to boot.
Physical media has been making a comeback. There are a few reasons for this, whether it be data preservation, enjoying a hit of nostalgia, or even enjoying some retro tech you weren’t around for. Whatever the case, though, there’s a lot of appeal in building a collection of media you can pull off the shelf whenever you want. You know what’s even better? The fun of creating old-school mixtapes.
All You Need to Start Recording
The Kickback is a retro-inspired product line from 90sTimeMachine, and one of the most interesting products of the line is its cassette recording kit. The kit gives you everything to both record and listen to mixtapes, which is neat. It is clearly meant to invoke the days when you’d carefully choose a selection of songs to invoke a certain feeling—or just for something to listen to in the car. Modern playlists with hundreds of songs (or more) have lost that magic that limited run times would provide. In addition, creating these mixtapes is as simple as plugging the kit into your PC, booting up your playlist, and hitting ‘Record’ on the kit. It’s a modernized way to record and enjoy a nostalgic form of music.
The Kickback DIY Mixtape Kit
90sTimeMachine’s DIY Mixtape Kit has everything you need to record your own cassettes, whether that is to share your favorite music with your friends, enjoy a bit of audio nostalgia, or to preserve your music collection in a physical form.
The Kickback does not offer a similar kit for ripping CDs, though the company does have the Retradisc player that makes it easy to listen to any CD-ROMs you do have. Besides, it’s still fairly easy to rip your own CDs on your computer without the need for kits or additional hardware, aside from a CD drive if your PC is missing one. Cassettes need hardware for recording that’s not as easily available, so a kit like this is extremely helpful for someone just starting out.
But if you’re looking for near-perfect reproductions of your favorite songs as they’d sound on Spotify or another music streaming service, you won’t get that with a cassette. Cassettes have the same appeal as vinyls in that they’re an old-school, nostalgic way to listen to music.
Backup Your Music So You Don’t Lose It
Just as (or maybe more) important, putting music onto cassettes and other physical media means you own it. You can do whatever you want with them, whether you’re using CDs and cassettes to back up your music, to give to other people, or even just enjoying some nostalgia with old-school devices. Companies can’t take away access to a CD or vinyl.
With music, movies, and shows predominantly being on streaming services, you don’t own any of this media and lose access the moment your subscription runs out. Couple that with content being removed or moved to other services, and it leads to issues with just finding the music or shows you want to watch. But the problem extends beyond streaming services.
If you buy any media digitally, you technically own it, but that doesn’t mean it will be available indefinitely, nor can you be assured that the media will be easy to download in a format that’s easy to use with other sites or devices. Amazon recently removed the ability to download Kindle eBooks to your PC, making it harder to back up your book purchases or even use them with a non-Kindle eReader.
You don’t need to deal with these issues if you have the physical media on hand, so even if building up these collections is more pricey, it’s well worth it for those worried about true ownership of any sort of media, be it music, video games, or TV shows and movies.
Expand Your Collection
If you picked up the Cassette Kit and decided you want to start growing a collection, there are a few options available. It’s pretty inexpensive to get more blank cassette tapes, so you can make more mixes for yourself or your friends. If you want to go even further, you can look for official cassettes (new and old alike), pick up a boombox, and enjoy more of that nostalgic music experience. Just make sure that if you’re going to start collecting, that isn’t just because you’re following a trend—it’s because you’re legitimately looking for the experience you like the most.
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