The Bookcassette® - Analog ingenuity
This is a short video about something very simple, but its one I’ve been meaning to cover for a few years. A tidy up and hunt for something else resulted in this project finally rising to the top of the pile. Getting this done also opens the door to following it up with other later but related tech in the future. I’d better see how far this lead balloon flies first.
In other news, it’s been ‘fail week’ at the Techmoan studio complex. First the internal 2TB SSD started playing up in my editing computer - a M1 Mac Mini. Of course every piece of disk checking software reports that it’s working just fine…so that'll be a fun warranty claim. Anyway after buying a new fast 2TB external SSD and much copying of files I moved across to my backup editing machine - an Intel based Mac Mini - and then that immediately got up and died. Its internal 1TB SSD decided to show solidarity with its brother. In the end this weeks’ video eventually comes courtesy of a laptop with a boat-load of stuff hanging off it. I’m just waiting for this one to buy the farm now too. Anyway the show must go on but possibly expect a few shorter/simpler videos while I continue to work around life and now tech issues.
Hope your week has been good to you and I hope the weekend proves to be even better.
Comments (54)
Audible stuff is mostly, from what I've gathered, in mono even when source material is available in stereo.
Right this has been bugging me but I finally remembered. The original album of Torment and Toreros by Marc and the Mambas did a similar left channel etc thing with their version of Beat out dat rhythm of a drum and the original song from the opera. Listened in stereo and you heard both at same time, change to r or l speaker and you heard one version 😁
Watched it again now that it's public (gotta drive those views) and was reminded how much I enjoyed the adapter/dongle joke.
Mat, have you ever heard of Mohawk Midgetape ...or the Norelco Voice Tape machine? They look unusual.
I do have a couple of really nice Mohawk Midgetape machines to show one day. In fact I just tripped over one of them this afternoon. Not sure on the Norelco, it’ll be a Philips, so is that a Minicassette machine?
Does the tone at 1.35 remind you of anything? https://youtu.be/fqYUVit3gj4
What tone? Video is disturbing.
I know there were once highly abridged books on vinyl, and obviously we all know about Books on Tape, and eventually CDs. But where there ever books on 8-track? That seems an ideal format for travel.
I’ve yet to encounter any in the wild.
Interestingly, the Digital Compact Cassette format has a "4 sector" format (as they called it), where each side of the tape has two mono streams instead of a single stereo stream. It was intended for things like audio books. As far as we know at the DCC Museum, no tapes were ever released in that format.
Would it work in the car? of course, everyone needs DCC in their car :) https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/233290589748
I hope you have all of your computer issues sorted. 🤞 On another topic...are you sure you wouldn't want this karaoke camera device? https://ibb.co/QKwYshC (not a serious suggestion).
I’m still looking at reinstallation screens at the moment - that’s been my Sunday so far. ‘under a minute remaining’ for 20 mins. On the subject of karaoke - I do have some other systems I’ve yet to show - but I don’t think anyone finds them interesting.
Love the little poke at Audible and the dongle life. Enjoyable episode as always! Quite concerning to hear of an SSD failure in such a new machine, hope you get it sorted.
Ha love the dongle skit, trying to use Apple laptops professionally the last few years has given me a severe case of dongle-ituss 🤣 🥴relieved there is some light at end of the tunnel now on that front 🤗 Good luck with getting the minis back in the game. Very frustrating when these things conspire send good silicon vibes your way !
Thanks. I’m doing a re-format and reinstall today…I’ll see how that goes.
Lol I remember buying one of these at a yard sale when I was a kid. Then when I popped it in my Gran Prix FauxMan got both sides playing at once. I just assumed it was broken and tossed it. 50¢ lost. 🤣
Really sorry to hear about your SSD etc. woes. Mat. Interesting video about a clever idea. Personally, I'd have made that adapter with one plug one socket and a L/R switch. :-)
I was expecting the same - and if I’d let the announcement on the tape continue it did mention ‘if you have a book cassette adaptor move the switch to the left position’…but I stopped it short for two reasons. 1. It’d cause confusion when I showed the adaptor. 2. The high pitch noise on the right channel would generate complaints.
What a great little video. Particularly liked this subject since I've been audio booking it since the tape era- never dealt with this company here in the states though. Really liked the wink at the end as well.
So video this might explain something I have wondered about for years. I had a Sony CFM A50 or the UK version which had a half speed button that I could never think of a reason to use. I assume this may of been it's intended use .
Voice is fine at half normal cassette speed, that’s the standard micro-cassette/mini cassette speed. So yes if you were recording voice then you could save on tape.
Loved the vid, sorry to hear about the technical issues, perhaps its time to look into server backups like a synology NAS for example?
I've got backups out the whazoo - that's how I managed to keep this video from getting lost. The only problem is that you need a working machine to use a backup and then you need to reinstall all the backed up data before you can use it.
It's quite similar to the 4-channel recording on a reel-to-reel tape, there you can select which channel to record and playback. Due to compatibility issues however, they could not implement such a thing on compact cassette: to be able to erase a full mono track, you need a mono erase head, hence you cannot erase the stereo tracks separately... But of course, making a recording in one go with completely different programmes on the left and right channels is possible, I guess the master has certainly be a reel-to-reel tape.
Am I a lucky person? I’ve been with computers since 1992 and have never experienced a hard disk failure! Only once in a RAID 5 configuration and the bad drive was replaced without any data lose or downtime. I hope you can replace those failing SSDs and get back on track soon.
Guess you are lucky, I've seen many hard disks die... Especially Seagate Barracudas and 2.5" Laptop drives in general. The bad thing is that due to the way the ATA interface works, the OS does not know about it and you don't get an error message, simply your computer starts getting really slow, and in the end doesn't work anymore.
There are many people on YouTube who create content on old tech, but Mat makes it so interesting to watch, I don't go anywhere else. Apart from LGR for old computers.
There's other channels? 😮😉
But is the Audible version of that book specifically the same recording? Also this is the same format used by the American Printing House for the Blind Books on Tape and its player, so if you still have that player it should work there too. I wish I could find the tape player I should still have; I don't think I have any tapes though (it *was* a library and we did have to send those back). (Thanks for doing those videos again; they're the reason I decided to become a patron in the first place, or raise my patronage to what it currently is; I forget now.)
The recording will be the same - unless it isn’t. By that I mean these things can get redone, but they don’t necessarily have to be. I listened to an Audible audiobook by David Niven - read by the man himself, and he died in 1983. If I remember correctly the APH books are slowed when compared to a normal cassette…but I may be wrong, I often am.
Fine video as ever, Mat. Sorry about your Mac woes - good luck with fixing them. I’m always rather depressed when I’m reminded one company has a monopoly of the audio book market. What happened to the idea that monopolies being bad things?
Well you’ve got to bear in mind that there’s only one company that can sell sell the Monopoly™ board game.
the machines are plotting against you! what have you done to offend them so greatly :(
Just blame it all on Skynet.
Great video. Love audio books something about listening to them on tape like listening to vinyl. Know in past got to the last tape of book for the player to chew it. I tend to get my audio books from archive.org old retro shows out of copyright . Hope u computer woes get sorted
Nice video as ever. Hope the technical woes get resolved. I like my M1 Mac Mini but it certainly hasn't been used as intensively as yours must be. In the 80s, historic (mono) recordings were released on CD. They used a similar trick of completely separate recordings on the left and right channels with an adaptor to combine the left or right so that you didn't have a silent speaker. I've never seen one of these discs but remember reviews of them in the Penguin Guide. In fact, haven't you shown something like that before or am I going senile?
Yes - https://youtu.be/5fG1crhGqI0 there’s nothing new here. It’s all just a never ending greatest hits compilation.
Also, your channel always makes me nostalgic for old tech... which I suppose is the point! Seeing this video reminded me of how innovative people are forced to be when technology is limited. Now with software controlling everything it feels like that spirit of stretching a technology to its limits is gone. I'm also impressed at how you seem to be able to scour the ends of the earth to find good examples of very niche technology. Always a pleasure to subscribe to your channel.
Hope all the technical issues will be resolved soon! Not due to the recent update to macOS Monterey?
I was hoping the upgrade would fix the issue - but unsurprisingly it made it worse.
This is a shot in the dark, but is it possible you have a virus? I know Macs don't have as wide as variety of viruses as PC's, but if your disk checker is not showing any hardware faults it may be worth checking out. I'm not a Mac user, so I don't know if my experience translates, but I once had a PC with a HDD that displayed similar symptoms to the symptoms you describe, and some anti virus software and a reformat cured the problem.
There’s no chance - I keep the editing computer air gapped from the world. I’ll reformat it over the weekend and try to start from scratch.
You would think that with no moving parts, SSDs would last forever, unlike spinning HDs. 🤔
You would.
This is a great treat for Friday afternoon! Immediately upon your description of the reduced amount of cassettes I thought, "they're using that right-left channel trick, like that 2.5 hour CD" that you did many moons ago. But they explained this process far better than the CD. Thanks for this, and I hope everything else at the TM Studio Complex is faring better...yikes. Have a good weekend.
This was my first thought was well! Seems to make more sense here. I'm surprised they didn't use it for any CD audiobooks, I guess CDs were much cheaper to manufacture by the time they thought about it?
As I was watching, I was wondering how the adapter might work - maybe a little toggle switch between the L and R? Nope, nothing so exotic. Also, SSDs always make me a but nervous. Way better in every way than spinning disks but when they fail they do so without any warning it seems.
I had a hard disc do that about a year ago. It just sat there clicking. Luckily I had backed it up a couple of weeks earlier. The real nightmare is having a drive that isn't easily replaceable, whether it is 2.5" M2 or whatever. That works both ways. When the DVD drive failed in my Sony hard drive recorder I thought all my recordings were trapped in it. Swapping drives with another machine didn't work. However, using a PC and UFS explorer I was able to rescue the files despite the recorders OS being something completely obscure (BSD?).
Mat I hope you get your disks all sorted out.
Bad news on the SSD :( Wonder what it means for my M1 purchase ...
Thanks for the short but enlightening video. I got one of those adapters down in the basement somewhere but beside its obvious function I was never sure for what exact purpose it was made for. So that was very enlightening. Sorry to hear about your tech issues.
Thanks Mat. Dang, I just discovered my headphones are wired the wrong way around. I just checked it with a old Slade 45 record where the into is on one channel. Time to put a sticky label on the "real" left side! Best wishes!
Oh god multiple drive failure, not a fun thing to deal with whatsoever. Hope it doesn't lead to too much head-bashed-against-wall syndrome, especially with warranty claims. And a good weekend to you as well!