Did I just cross paths with the coolest person on the face of the earth? 🤣

You mean as magnetic tape storage on the cheap? 😄 Worth the try, but be prepared for some data degradation in the transfer?

Fwiw, I think this looks very well kept, and you already gave the insides a checkup.

I'm not familiar with the model, but Harman Kardon has a good reputation for quality builds. If it plays, I'm sure it'll serve you a good while.

Most decks are the same generic black box with small variations. Personally I'd go for something with analog VU meters, but different strokes and all that.

Hey, that's a nice one! Hook it up to your receiver and play all your tapes!

My one remaining tape is a mix I recorded in my late teens, put together to ruin other people's parties. One or two dance songs, then a burst of death metal, then some more pop before whatever schlager or polka BS I could find in my parents' collection. And so forth for 90 minutes.

Unsurprisingly, nobody would let me near the stereo at parties after a while, and joke's on me. I'm stuck with the Tape of Terror all those years later 🤣

It might be fun to compose mix tapes again, but you'd have to find other cassette deck owners to share them with.

Word.

Update: thanks y'all! I decided to keep it for now! 🥰 Now it's part of my next gen audio rig. 🤙

Own your music, and record anything. 'Nuff said.

Always good to stumble upon another Fallout fan!

Hold my beer. 🤣 I'm off to another thrift store as we speak.

You had me at Fallout. 😁🩷

It's only my shitty opinion but only the green level meter appeals to me. But you can keep it until you find one that is more cyberpunk, futuristic, or retro. Or until you find a large deck that can play MiniDiscs (now THAT would be my life's achievement).

Another person just reminded me that this deck can record, so that's one load off my chest 😂 Which one tape do you have left? 😃

Sic! That's a big plus. Which reminds me: I can actually record anything and everything from my computer as well. Sort of the opposite of digitizing. Analogizing? 🤣 Next question: can I just cat any data to my audio card and then record that data on these audio cassettes or do I need special equipment for that? 🤔

I don't know how to react here. 🤣 No, I didn't have one already. That's on me? My bad? I'm sorry? 🤣 About the looks: is has a cover, which I didn't care to put on for the show:

I'll be honest: it's not the prettiest. Don't you have one already?

You can record your favorite songs off the radio

Honestly, same. Except I keep having to remind myself just before I buy a cassette deck that I have exactly one 30+ years old mix tape to play on it.

I like the idea of cassettes, and the mechanics. I enjoyed listening to cassettes back in the day, but I haven't kept the small collection (and anyway I'd cringe now at my music of that time).

I don't see much music available on tapes that I'd want to listen to now either, but I know in my gut that someday I'm going to buy a deck for my home stereo setup. Just because... I guess retro is fun, yeah? 😅

That's a classic. I wouldn't be surprised if in a Fallout scenario those things would be found still working, amidst the rubble.

Why you should keep it? That rough sound from a tape has its own mystic. Akin to the vynil and vacuum tubes. And it can be a conversation starter.

Personally, I would value fidelity over ubiquity. After all, the recipient can transcode it themselves if they need to, but they're not necessarily going to be able to re-digitize it with higher quality in the future.

As such, I'd use the most modern video codec I could find (and use generous quality settings with it) and use FLAC for audio.

The question is partially answered by the other comments. I have just few details to had :

As it's the compatibility that matter you have a question of target player to answer :

• to be compatible with older player, the most widespread container is AVI. It's the lightest to decode and I never found a player without this format
• to be compatible with all the recent players, there is no alternative to mp4, but beware only the mpeg-2 and h264 compression are widespread
• to be compatible with all future players : the mkv is the way, as it can expose multiple stream with alternative codec for audio and video (mp3 + aac + av1 + h264 in the same file) allow the player to open the one it can read

Now you can choose !

I've run into issues with MKV - like my Samsung TV can technically play them, but it does much better with MP4 (I still use MKV for future-proofing, and just deal with the tv being fickle).

Most people aren't like me, and won't tolerate that inconvenience.

As a Samsung TV owner, it can play MKV. But it does better (more consistent) with MP4.

To MKV is a more future-proof solution. MP4 is more compatible, today.

Tough call.

Though since it's for other people, I'd probably give them MP4, and highest quality those videos can benefit from.

You definitely want to do it properly with something like ffmpeg. Just renaming it leaves you with a misnamed mkv file. (Or whatever is inside.) Linux is clever enough to figure that out, because in the good old days, file extensions weren't all that important. But yeah, some other device might not. And even some Linux software might not get that. Also you won't really change anything, a name is just a name.

Careful, you seem to confuse video encodings (e.g. mpeg, h264, h265, av1) with video containers (e.g. mkv, avi, webm). When digitizing old media, the encoding is much more important because changing it afterwards means losing quality whereas changing the container format doesn't.