12
votes
What creative projects have you been working on?
This topic is part of a series. It is meant to be a place for users to discuss creative projects they have been working on.
Projects can be personal, professional, physical, digital, or even just ideas.
If you have any creative projects that you have been working on or want to eventually work on, this is a place for discussing those.
Recently, I've "re"discovered the long lost art of bootlegging cassettes. Granted, they're not the best quality tapes (Maxell UR 90 Normal Bias - Type I) as I record directly from MP3 and my player has a bit of flutter, but actually holding and playing something physical, as well as printing out the designs via inkjet...yeah, that's the good stuff.
...part of the craft of bootlegging used to be smuggling-in, assembling, and surreptitiously recording live performances, with all the logististical challenges a venue might present to that process: half the fun was just capturing that lost moment in time, the other half relishing its preservation...
...now that console recordings are ubiquitous and everyone carries a recorder in their pocket anyway, i don't bother anymore and just enjoy the experience in real time, instead...
...contextually, i infer that you're talking about mix-tapes rather than bootlegs, though...
Yeah, I don't consider myself a concert-goer in any capacity. My hearing is my best asset. I just call them "bootlegs" because "mix-tapes", to me, implies a mixture of different tracks from different artists rolled into one tape. I like continuity, so I'm essentially putting the whole in-ordered album of an artist on a tape and dividing it into sides A & B, however that ends up looking like. I do the whole custom J-card thing as well, or at least trying to. Hard to get some detail in printing at 144dpi.
...wait, so you're taking an extant album and adapting it to the cassette medium?..like producing what the label would have issued if they still released cassettes?..
...after ninety-minute cassettes hit the market, we used to record one album per side (back when most albums were about fourty-five minutes due to vinyl production limitations) and i have many fond memories of hours and hours with those homebrew "double albums" which i still associate as pairs...in fact, record labels eventually got in on the same action, double-packaging two back-catalog albums or EPs together on a single cassette for retail...
...i have a few rare CDs i was unable to find with their original booklets/liner art, which i instead carefully reconstructed in photoshop, printed, + assembled into a jewel case, with conjectural interiors and graphical layout elements based upon other releases by the same artist and contemporaneous trade dress of the same label...i guess that's similar to what you're doing, plus identifying where to split sides of the original album program?..
(i think sides have become a lost compositional element in album production; i often separate my digital library sides - and bonus tracks! - to reproduce the intended listening experience of albums which were clearly structured accordingly)
...if you have vintage cassettes you'll note that the original offset printing often used pretty muddied art anyway, typically adapted from vinyl sleeves, a couple of generations downstream from the camera-ready source...
That's pretty cool and can see the appeal. Not sure if it's just the state of things moving towards owning anything not being the standard, but I've been finding myself recently invigorated by my purchase of my Switch 2.
However, I'm actually playing it more by hunting down obscure or even common physical versions of Nintendo Switch 1 games. Via offerup, FB marketplace, or mainly EBay I've gotten about 20 games normally under $20 each. Lots of games still hold value (pokemon, Mario, Zelda), but been pretty patient and found other games like Rune Factory which I had never played.
All this to say, I feel it's been good for my wallet and mental health (looking at you Steam sales, Humble Bundle, etc.) to have physical media to see the reflective state of my backlog. When I want to play a game, it's a conscious decision that has the physical act of putting in the cartridge that helps when I have free time for games. If I'm not even willing to pick and put in a game, I get an opportunity to ask if I should do something else with my free time. This has helped give more chances to spend a bit of time cleaning, going and touching some grass, or just some time to exercise/stretch.
Sorry to hijack your comment, just really like your take on physical media and how I've been enjoying it too on my own way. I should start burning CDs again or something 😂
Hijacking is fine by me as it spurns related discussion, in my opinion. Either way, I've been trying to become more of a technology prepper these days juuuuust in case. Physical media is always a good thing. I have a decent collection of PSP UMDs from "back in the day", as well as a rare UMD movie.
Related: I have bought a couple of old walkmen and replaced the belts, getting them to work again. It's been really fun. What do you use to record your casettes?
From start to finish, front to back, this is what I do.
I find a good music album on YouTube and look to see if it has a dedicated playlist. Most often, it usually does.
I open up a terminal (Linux Mint Cinnamon - yeah, I'm one of those people) and run the command
yt-dlp -x --audio-format mp3 [PLAYLIST LINK URL HERE]in order to rip the whole playlist in one go and place it in my home directory, where I then edit the metadata with EasyTAG to ensure the songs are numbered correctly and everything else.I have an MP3 player I use that's fairly cheap (AGPTEK A02) that allows usage of an SD card. From my home directory on my stupid All-In-One, I load the MP3s onto a SanDisk Extreme 128GB microSDXC UHS-I card from the SD adapter on my stupid All-In-One, take the MicroSD out and load it into the MP3 player.
After confirming the playlist order, making sure the playlist is good to go, I use an EMK 4 Pole 3.5mm Male-to-Male (1.5ft) audio cable to plug it into the headphone jack on the bottom of the MP3 player. I put the other end into the tape recorder's mic input. The device itself is a Panasonic RR-830, which is more of a dictation machine, but still works better than the other one I have, which is a Panasonic RQ-2102 Slimline Handheld.
The specific tape cassettes I use are cheap stock, in my opinion. They are Maxell UR 90 Normal Bias Type I. With the EMK connecting the MP3 to the Panasonic, I give the tape a second or two to record dead air and let the playlist from the MP3 run halfway through Side A. I pause the Panasonic to get rid of that click of the mechanism as it records a subtle pop in without pressing pause beforehand, then turn the tape over to record the Side B.
After the recording is done, I confirm the tape plays all the way through with minimal flutter and reuse the clear Maxell case to insert a J-card I make from a master template (which I also made) off of Photopea. Granted, it's not the best quality, because it is at 144dpi on an inkjet, but it gets the message across. With the print-out, I cut it out using a CARL Heavy-Duty 15" Rotary Paper Trimmer and use the included perforation wheel to make the folds crisp and accurate, and then label the cassette with one of the default templates off of a Brother P-touch D220 label maker.
Hopefully that covers everything!
We're about to adopte some pet rats, and one of the breeder's requirements is that they have a free-roam area. I designed and built this one this weekend.
The panels are 24"x36" coroplast (like what they make political yard signs out of here in the US). They are connected with hinges I designed and 3D printed. My two biggest requirements were that it be easily folded up for storage and that the gaps be small enough to keep the rats from squeezing out. I was able to achieve both by making the hinges two-part (they actually hinge twice). This allows them to fold flat either way, so you can accordion fold the panels together. This made the hinges very long, so to make the gaps small, I cut insets for the hinges into the panels. The panels nearly meet when fully open (gap is about 2 mm).
Cutting the holes and insets in the panels worked pretty well. The plastic is easily cut with big scissors, an xacto knife, or a utility knife. Surprisingly, it didn't work very well to drill the plastic, so I had to cut the holes out with an xacto knife. I 3D printed templates for marking the insets and holes which helped keep things consistent.
To make them more compact and stronger, the hinge pins are M3x45 bolts secured with nylock nuts. The part of the hinge that holds the panel has a 3D printed threaded hole. A printed screw goes in the hope once the panel is inserted to keep it from pulling out.
The panel screws are mostly headless so that the panels fold flat. There is one set of panel screws that has thumb screws on it to make it easier to take the panels apart for folding. Without opening the loop, they still still collapse down to a 2 panel wide flat configuration, but if you separate the one panel, the whole thing folds to the size of one panel and about 8 cm thick.
I think I will add a door in one panel to make it easier to go in and out of when it is set up. And of course, we will see how the rats do, but I've seen videos of free roam areas that were just made out of cardboard, so I think this will be okay.