I do! I had an internship at UT-Austin’s College of Fine Arts, and their recording studio had a multitrack Studer. It used 2" tape – I don’t remember whether it was 16- or 32-track. (The Austin City Limits studio, had one, too, at the time.) I never got to mess with it, directly – mostly I recorded student recitals* (and Austin Symphony concerts), 2 microphones (Neumanns!) though a mixer into a DAT.
I think they fired up the Studer 3 or 4 times while I was there, one of which was to record (most of) this.
And… that was the extent of my career in the recording industry. Years and years later, I did sort of put my degree to use, when I narrated promotional or training videos for the small company where I was working.
*(Also just remembered that if they anticipated doing any editing at all, they’d record to an Otari reel-to-reel. This was before they had computer equipment and they’d still splice by hand, then record that onto a DAT. When one of the musicians asked if that would be noticeable, the engineer replied “oh, I dunno, your dog might notice…”)
just happened upon this video where a guy plays a cassette 1000 times and compares it to the first play. amazingly the cassette shows very little audible wear. The technology was much better than we give it credit for: Playing a cassette tape over ONE THOUSAND times! - YouTube
Oh they were copyable, and mixable, but hard to share with anyone who didn’t also have a DAT deck, which was mostly everyone. Good solution for portable pro audio recording if you had a studio to work with it after, but the price of entry kept it from catching on outside of that.
Back in the day, prerecorded tapes sucked enough that I preferred to transfer from LP (or later, CD) onto good blanks. Generally, I’d try to fill any extra tape at the end with as many “singles” as I could fit. I was surprised that I never lost a tape to a hungry transport, but that wasn’t far from my mind as a secondary reason to make my own tapes. I can certainly remember my folks’ 8-track player eating the occasional cartridge.
Now, 8-track was a format that died a well-deserved death. It wasn’t just the wear-prone continuous loop tape, the integrated pinch roller that would turn to goo, and crumbling pressure pads, it was also the <fade out> CLUNK! <fade in> in the middle of songs, the lack of fast forward or rewind, and the songs in the wrong order.
I’d be curious to know if anyone has hacked direct analog recording and playback onto any of the generations of LTO drives. That wouldn’t help you with existing cassettes; but it’s a lot more tape area to work with; as well as being not-totally-dead, so hardware built for relatively demanding customers continues to be produced to the present day; but declining enough that you can probably get something on the secondary market rather than calling your IBM rep and dying of sticker shock.
It would, obviously, be trivial to record digital audio on LTO tape; but if you are going to do that you might as well use any one of the vastly more convenient media for the job.
I had a copy of “Heroes” on prerecorded cassette. I never figured out how it happened, but a couple of seconds got shifted/copied onto the other side’s tracks – with the result that after “Blackout” faded out, at the end of Side 1, there were a couple of seconds of “V-2 Schneider”. Then, after Side 2 started, there were a couple of seconds where that bit of audio dropped out from the beginning of “V-2 Schneider”.
When I was getting into Brian Eno, someone played me the prerecorded cassette of Here Come the Warm Jets. We both thought it was cool how the beginning of the album sounded like a tape slowing down, then the end of it sounded like a tape speeding up. Except shortly thereafter, I bought my own copy (also on prerecorded cassette) and it didn’t start nor end that way. I figured out that he’d gotten a defective copy, but he couldn’t believe it – “no, it’s an Eno album, I’m sure it was supposed to be that way!” He was a bit disappointed about it, but I suggested that’s still how Eno might’ve wanted it.
minidiscs fulfilled the promise of cassettes, small and portable, reasonable fidelity, an easy way to make recordings of your more precious LPs and even CDs to take out into the ugly dangerous world. Till the MP3 beat them at their own game, first haltingly on dedicated players, and then decisively as they moved to your phone, already in your pocket anyway.
Having to play music in real-time to record it to minidisc and then having no mechanism to copy those recordings back to a pc once they were on minidisc didn’t help. I believe Sony’s media side have a history of hobbling their hardware folks, unfortunately.
