An example of a hyper-specific niche in a once widely popular platform: Loop cassettes

There are all kinds of convoluted internal pathways, but they do the same thing: Add length to seamlessly continuous playback

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@cypnk None of these would be all that long, even, would they? I wonder how long you could make it without doing something like 8-track or how ink ribbons worked.

@Felthry I would guess most are less than 30 seconds. So theses examples would be used in something like short announcements , even short snippet elevator music, or maybe older answering machines

@cypnk I wonder if some fancy devices might have run multiple tracks on the tape... but then you'd need some way to detect when to switch tracks

@Felthry Some tape decks offered this feature. When the deck A cassette ended both sides, deck B would be rewound and ready to go. I don't know if any models offered more than 2, but I'm sure some small market segment used them. Maybe in retail shops

@cypnk On infinite-loop tape, though, you'd need to splice in a section that can be used to detect the end of the track, like the foil bit on 8-tracks

@Felthry I don't think cassettes had something like that since they had definite starts and stops. As for loops, the whole reason for having an "infinite-loop" is that there are no endings

Tascam made tape decks to time your loop in mixers, I think, but that was a player determined setup. There was no marker on the tape itself

@cypnk Right--what I'm saying is that if you wanted to use multiple tracks on the tape in order to increase the length of a loop, you would have to know when to switch tracks.

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