![]() ![]() ![]() So far, I haven't mentioned the rubber pinch roller, also shown in Figure 1. Figure 1 shows a typical cassette deck head and tape guide layout. When no more brown oxide comes off, wipe away any excess alcohol with a dry cotton bud, and wait a couple of minutes for any remaining alcohol to evaporate before putting a tape into the machine. Using a cotton bud soaked in the alcohol, clean the record head, the playback head, the capstan and all the guides, then repeat using a new cotton bud. However, a lesser‑known problem is that of oxide adhering to the tape guides, which can interfere with the smooth passage of the tape, resulting in wow, flutter, and a phasey kind of sound as the tape snakes across the heads in an uneven way. It is generally known that dislodged particles of tape oxide build up on the heads, causing a loss of top end or even dropouts. If your cassette deck has a removable door, this will provide better access for cleaning purposes, but even without one, you should be able to reach the tape heads, capstan shaft and tape guides. Cotton buds with wooden stalks are recommended, but the plastic type seem to work fine too. A litre of the latter will cost you about the same as a tiny bottle of the former, and though you may have to wait a day or two while the pharmacist orders it for you, a litre will last for years. ![]() For this, you'll need a pack of ordinary cotton buds (the things that people poke - wrongly - into babies' ears), and either an exorbitantly expensive bottle of head‑cleaning fluid (which is really isopropyl alcohol with a small amount of dye added) or a bottle of isopropyl alcohol from the chemists. ![]() My advice is to forget all about head‑cleaning tapes, and use the traditional cotton buds and alcohol method. Furthermore, there's still a hard core of reactionaries out there who refuse to clean anything at all! Clean MachineĪt the risk of sounding like someone's mother‑in‑law, I'll start off on the subject of cleaning the cassette deck, because, even though most of you get around to doing it, some ways of cleaning are more effective than others. There are several factors that can cause a cassette machine to perform below par, most of which, fortunately, we can do something about. Nevertheless, when on top form, analogue cassettes can sound very good indeed. Perhaps we're expecting a lot of the humble cassette in an era when we take CD and DAT for granted. A significant number of SOS readers' telephone enquiries or Crosstalk letters relate to difficulties in either producing a cassette recording of acceptable quality, or the age‑old problem of a recording sounding OK on the machine on which it's made, but quite different when played back on someone else's machine. The compact cassette format is now over two decades old, and though there have been improvements in hardware design, noise reduction technology, and tape formulations, the cassette is still considered by many to be the carbuncle on the backside of modern‑day audio. To record with TapeDeck, you must have a built-in microphone, use device plugged into your Mac's line-in port (such as a microphone, record player, etc.), or another audio input device (USB input, Bluetooth headset, etc.).Love it or loathe it, the analogue cassette looks set to be the primary medium for the distribution of recorded music for the foreseeable future, and we have to make the best of it. m4a audio files, so you can copy them into iTunes and synchronize them with your iPod, or email tapes to others. TapeDeck has these too, but they're full-text searchable. An audiocassette has a label (where you can write a little bit) and a case liner (where you can write a lot).You can adjust the recording quality to trade file size for recording length. TapeDeck's recording quality is far better than that of an audiocassette.In much the same way that digital cameras made film "free," TapeDeck makes tapes "free": you'll never run out of tape (until you run out of disk space).Of course, TapeDeck improves on the traditional tape recorder in a number of ways: You cannot record over an existing tape clicking Record automatically starts a new tape for you.Every recording you ever make is immediately saved in the box of Tapes.You're never more than a single mouse click (or keystroke) away from making a new recording, which are called, unsurprisingly, "tapes." TapeDeck records directly to compressed MP4-AAC audio, making it equally useful for quick high-fidelity samples or hours and hours of lecture.Īs you can see, TapeDeck was designed to emulate a real cassette tape recorder (perhaps you have a similar model in your basement), but with a few key differences: TapeDeck is a new audio recorder exclusively for Mac OS X 10.5, designed with a quick-capture workflow in mind. ![]()
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