At the time, walkmans were trending: people would use recording devices to record the song if it played via the radio or at a concert. You would know at least one friend who has a legit copy (vinyl or cassette) “borrowing” that for the purpose of pirating music, in which that finished recording is replayed on a walkman to listen.
The invdividual uses a voice recorder, the ones with cassettes to store audio but what could happen is that you can capture other audio cues irrelevant to the song (door opening or people speaking in the background). It’s kind of volatile in that sense, unless you are in a room that’s dead silent and soundproof capturing the audio.
tape to tape recording (aka dubbing) was a thing. It would be done in real time unless your deck had high speed dubbing, but that often resulted in a slightly poorer quality.
You could also record direct to tape from radio, LP, or CDs, so not sure why the microphone and background noise thing is an issue. Even before dual decks you could have separates where you could plug the output from one unit into the input of another.
Duplicating tapes from sources was a thing in the 80s for sure.
Haha is that a Dead Kennedys tape? Jello is the fucking man
You betcha it is!
One of my favorite tshirts from the era had the Alternative Tenacles logo (the bat thing lower right) and said: “Home Taping is Killing Record Industry Profits… Killing Ain’t Wrong”
The AT logo is how I recognized it! I’d know that freaky lil bat anywhere
My dude, it was the 80s, not the dark ages. We didn’t normally have to use a voice recorder to dub tapes. Component systems made taping off records, cassettes, radio, or whatever else easy. Every one of my friends had a dual cassette deck somewhere in the house.
I can’t think of a single person - my grandparents included - who DIDN’T have a dubbed copy of an album or a mixtape someone has given them.
I had a ghettoblaster with tape-to-tape at some point in the '80s and certainly copied a couple of albums that way - but I’ve never really been into music that much, so it wouldn’t have been many.
Prior to that we did have a horrible old mono tape recorder which I used to record some HHGTTG episodes on it’s original radio transmission by standing it beside the radio and begging the family to be quiet. I may even have those tapes somewhere - for sentimental value. They were appalling quality as you would expect.
I too had a ghetto blaster, which must sound pretty weird to people young enough to have never heard of them.
My folks had a ghetto blaster when I was growing up, and I thought it was a cool name - completely unaware of the racial implications
One day I was talking to a friend who also grew up in the CD era, and the topic steers towards my dad’s ghetto blaster. They grew very concerned and were like, “Is everything okay at home, does your dad have a manifesto, should we call the police or something?”
Even though they definitely knew what a boombox was, they thought I was talking about a TEC-9. I no longer call a boombox a ghetto blaster.
This is the third time I’ve seen a post on this theme in this community. I’m 100% certain that this is bot activity. It must be a common output of LLMs when asked to make posts to the fediverse. And it’s always a really dumb question that makes you think they’re an alien pretending to be one of us.
LOL! Let’s quiz it to see if we can get it to reply with haikus.
I think most people were annoyed by the radio DJ talking through an intro/outro because of recording your own mixtape. I still hear some phantom DJs in songs even though the tapes have long been lost to time.
Weird thing, there are many songs in Brazil that have a “DJ <whatever>” mixed in the middle of the track. Not a radio DJ, just some rando that got the music, put his name there and shared around. Not something from the 80s, but from 2000 onwards, tho, still around today
Seems that narcissistic disorder is not limited to presidents…
That’s why they would do it. Some live DJs still do, even though radio taping is long gone.
Yep. Pretty routinely - nobody cared. Nobody I knew played it on a Walkman or cared mch for them - having a car radio (and owning the car it was inside) was the real flex.
What do you think all those dual cassette decks were for?
So you could make friends a copy or copy friends’ music.
Perfectly acceptable at the time. Only an issue if you were selling them, but even then not a huge issue.
The invdividual uses a voice recorder
No, we just used a dual tape deck. Direct dub.
We would find people who had shows (concerts) we wanted and send blank tapes and postage for the return. They would copy the shows and send them back. All using the mail.
Of course it wasn’t piracy, the band let us record their shows, so I don’t know if it counts.
Tapes were copied directly to tapes. No microphones used for the tape copying part.
Yup sure did! It was called Columbia House. And I probably stole about $300s worth of Tapes and later CDs, save for the 1 Cent I sent them in the mail. I still have some of the CDs I ordered in a binder somewhere. The best part is, I was a kid!
Bootlegs of Hendrix and Zeppelin were floating around via sneakernet on cassette tapes. I had every one I could find.
Hell, back then Sony sold machines with 2 decks in them that would copy tapes. No other reason for them to exist than piracy but apparently there was a time when Sony wasn’t the archenemy of piracy.
I haven’t seen the term sneakernet in forever
Feel like these days there it’s pretty rare to hand carry any kind of digital format
Airgapped networks are still pretty common in certain cases. Sometimes for testing stuff at work I have a segregated virtual network that isn’t strictly airgapped, but I still have to move virtual media back and forth with my virtual sneakers.
I didn’t because I wasn’t alive back then
Well that was useful information, thank you for sharing it.
yeah I started young.
in the 80s Fischer Price had a kids tape deck that had a microphone attached to it. so you could put a blank tape in it and then use the microphone to record whatever you wanted. the quality wasn’t bad. so I’d make “mix tapes” for my friends of NES game soundtracks or songs off the radio. with the NES game tracks I would then try to sell the mixtape. songs from like the Batman game, Battletoads, Contra, Mega Man, etc. so I’d make the “first run” recording by holding the microphone up to the TV and then use my Dads stereo that had two decks to copy the “master” to other blank tapes and then sell them to my friends for like $1.
I’d then take the money I made and rent more games to rip the soundtracks and also buy comic books.
That sounds like so much fun
I had a buddy who was an audiophile (was the 80’s). He would copy all his Japanese and other import albums directly from the turntable to a fancy tape deck for me. I had oodles and oodles of pirated music that was high quality. All gone now though.
Borrowing?*
Also, most stuff I copied off the radio wouldn’t have background noise because you could play music and record directly to cassette. Or maybe it wasn’t loud enough in my room to pick anything else up. Same when I recorded my own mixes off CD to cassette.
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