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There has been a minor resurgence in "personal cassette tape players" (known more widely by Sony brand name 'walkmen') The most disturbing thing is how bare-bones these new products are... falling *far* short of the walkmen of yore.
This one is $80, it has a USB-C rechargeable battery, but no song skipping fast forward, no bluetooth, auto-reverse... frankly it's exceptional for having both rewind AND fast forward.
I feel like a barbarian looking at the achievements of the ancients.
I want a walkman that has *all* of the best old features AND a modern rechargeable battery, Bluetooth for my earbuds... and give me a little VFD display ...
But especially auto-reverse... that was the most magical aspect of tape players.
And I have all these tapes that were designed so you could "flip" them at certain points so the songs lined up in fun ways... Let me recapture the magic...
@futurebird You wouldn't even need most of the mechanical complexity - you could rapid-scan the contents of the tape into non-volatile memory and play back from there (but stil emulate the tape being there by allowing "auto-reverse/flip at this point"). Save wear and tear on the tape.
@futurebird Heh. Not enough nostalgia?
I like to see the wheels turning.
Put an LCD screen behind a little window with a movie of spinning wheels, plus a little speaker making whirr noises.
And a camera with OCR that reads the name of your tape and downloads mp3s of the songs on that tape.
There is a Fisher price LP record player. In the old days, each record had bumps that worked on a spring driven music box. In the modern version, the player recognizes the record, then plays the associated song from internal memory.
IDK... I feel like if it comes to this? I'd rather just move on. Let the dead tape stay dead and unplayed as their magnetic tape evaporates and fragments and becomes forgotten.
Let the bits be reclaimed by the magnetic fields of space... let the plastic turn to dust in the sun...
@futurebird @Zamfr @ersatzmaus There is an alternative - trying to make our own tapes and mechanisms! @nina_kali_nina has been trying to make tape. A mech probably isn't *that* hard for someone who knows what they're doing 
@krnlg @futurebird @Zamfr @ersatzmaus @nina_kali_nina gut feeling: I'd say the hard bit is the tape itself, with its magnetic coating, as well as the machines to record those to scale (even though you could probably recover some of those machines from studios).
@bovaz @krnlg @futurebird @Zamfr @ersatzmaus it is totally doable; with $20,000 investment you can get equipment to make 70s quality tape and tape heads - and you need $20 worth of equipment for the 40s quality
@Zamfr @futurebird @ersatzmaus
A friend's daughter once commented at a party how cool that our stereo had a display on top that made it look like it was actually playing a vinyl record, and our friend had to explain to her that it was actually playing a vinyl record.
@Zamfr @futurebird @ersatzmaus for a while I had a dream of building a tape player that would play MP3s that were digitally stored on a magnetic tape. Never actually got around to it, though.
@josh0 @Zamfr @futurebird @ersatzmaus You mean like a DAT?
Are ya'll just trying to torture a poor elderly lady?
Nowadays torture chambers just play screaming sounds over a speaker, then ask chatgpt to predict what the torturee would have confessed eventually.
This is much faster and cheaper than real torture.
@Zamfr @futurebird @ersatzmaus It also is no less accurate.