Pretty much everybody knows about audiocassettes. It is often a joke that the younger generations don’t know what it is, but being such a staple in popculture it is highly unlikely that you would find a teenager that is not at least aware of its existence. Most people know cassettes as music medium. Prerecorded cassettes were everywhere in the 80s and 90s. Cassettes were also really popular as personal recording platform. Voice memo’s or mixtapes were common things to record on an empty cassette. Most people used cassettes for these purposes. But at one point cassettes also served another purpose. If you think about saving data on retro computers you often think about the floppy disk. These were your go-to means of saving important data without losing everything after turning off your computer. However, before floppy’s became a thing, cassettes were used to store data.
Cassettes were used for data storage from 1975 to around mid 1980s. The way you would load data from a cassette was by playing the tape, which, depending on the amount of data on there, could take up to an hour. A 90 minute tape could hold approximately 660 kilobytes per 45 minute side, so 1320 kilobytes or slightly over 1 megabyte total. By interpreting the analogue audio signal as a stream of bits, the computer could, very slowly, receive data.
I’ve always been interested in this form of data storage. It holds something weirdly retro-futuristic. After figuring out that this method of datastorage can still be done today with modern computers, I decided to make that my project. But just putting some random text file on the cassette would be boring and not worth the time. It had to be something special. After a hard, long think it came to me. Music! Cassettes are predominantly used to store music, so why not store a music file? It would be funny and ironic that you can’t play a cassette that has technically music in your stereo without destroying your ears. So what kind of song did I put on there? It had to be something from the 80’s. So what other song than ‘Take On Me’ by Aha, one of the 80s’ most well known one-hit wonders.
The cassette holds a MIDI version of the song to save space, with a midi only taking up around 49 kilobytes with the MP3 version of the song taking up a whopping 9,2 megabytes. It’s quite funny really how the MP3 would fit easily on a cassette if it would be just recorded on there as audio input, but won’t fit if it’s encoded into a datacassette WAV file.
Take on me comparison from Yannick on Vimeo.