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.
The invdividual uses a voice recorder
No, we just used a dual tape deck. Direct dub.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Listen narc, I’m pretty sure the statute of limitations has passed on this, so you aren’t outing anyone with this phishing question.
The soviets used to produce bootleg copies of Western vinyls on x-ray since the sixties.
shots
Growing up in the nineties Russia I saw quite a few in home collections all over. Beatles on a ribcage, Judas Priest on a wrist, Black Sabbath on a skull. Some of them were bootlegs of bootlegs: getting your hand on an original recording was so rare and risky.
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.
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.
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!
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
If you had trusted friends in school, you could each chip in half the cost of a new album/tape you wanted to get, make a copy, and you each got to listen to it at home whenever you wanted. The next time you did it, the person who got the copy would get the original.
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.
It was the 2000s, not the 80s, but I absolutely recorded songs off the radio and copied library tapes for later. Good times.