Cassette BGM Systems - how to squeeze 4 hrs of music onto one tape - AEI Propac
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 28 พ.ค. 2024
- A single cassette tape might not be your first choice for playing hours of background music - but it was possible.
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ThatSFXGuy - • Six Million Dollar man... - วิทยาศาสตร์และเทคโนโลยี
"An obscure niche skill that I'll probably never use." is almost everything in my head.
Same here :P
yeah that is a thing I know. I also invent great stuff to fill those types of niche's for all sorts of people who'll never know they actually didn't have any need for things like that.
You know that the next garden party Techmoan hosts will be accompanied by music played on this device. He didn't just buy it to make this video. He must be a monster in the sack!
@@trippmoore it's for playing slower jams.
That will be the title of my autobiography...sums it all up lol
2:50 Two married sat navs arguing
Comment of the month! 👍😂
Free Saxon it sounds like a relic from MK Ultra.
Haha.
I rarely like comments but I just had to here
@@Zardox-The-Heretic-Slayer 👍🏻
PLEASE upload the AEI tape somewhere. That 90s cheap synth sound is something that has to be authentic, and there isn't enough out there. The label says non-copyright so it should be ok.
Agreed! It would make great samples for artists looking for cool sounds in their mixes.
copying prohibited... those who read have got a huge advantage.
Maybe put it on odyssey or something then
Agreed.
Yessss
While on cruise...
"Have you seen my husband? He's been gone an awful long time"
"Why yes ma'am, he's rummaging thru our cupboards going on and on about 4 tracks or some nonsense. Did he pack his meds?"
An 80s London pirate radio station, Radio Duck, managed it too. They had a car stereo fed with a C120 cassette, auto-reversing and playing the cassette track by track, and managing to get an ingenious 4 hours of mono playback for their tree-mounted transmitter! The dedication of the pirate broadcaster!
Stuff like that still happens in other parts of the world. I know for a fact that a few people around my neck of the woods used a Raspberry Pi, a 4G dongle and a pre-paid anonymous SIM-card to stream their live pirate show to the transmitter mounted somewhere in the middle of nowhere. Even had the RPi do RDS and all.
The radio station I work for kept its logs (we have to record and store our output for regulatory purposes for about 60 days) in some weird proprietary VHS audio format.
One VHS approximately correlated to 8 hours, so when the station went into automation at the end of the night the last presenter would have to pop a fresh VHS tape in, and the first presenter in the morning would have to quickly replace it or it would run out and we’d stop recording output!
It’s all digitally done now, no replacing of VHS tapes at 1AM for anyone.
That's a pretty smart way to avoid being tracked down to your bedroom or back-of-a-van mobile studio-cum-transmitter... prerecord everything and transmit it from a single compact unit. The deck plus transmitter (and the L/R switch...) and a 12V car battery could be hidden in a fairly small box in a high-up crook, and the antenna just run up one of the branches...
@@JacobDicker ... VHS was at one time actually a relatively common audio recording format, I'm given to believe. Even if you just used the linear audio track on a regular video tape and deck you can get 3 to 4 hours (in PAL regions) of archival-grade audio per tape, say for an AM station. Just have each DJ put in a fresh tape at the start of their show and eject it at the end. If you had a long-play (or NTSC SLP) deck which recorded a digital audio track you could get 6 to 8 hours of better-than-FM stereo (and a non-digital LP deck would still produce sufficient quality for recording voiceovers and identifying music tracks), which is probably what you saw being used.
There wasn't really any other cheap off-the-shelf recording solution that could record that length of audio of any quality at the time. And certainly nothing that provided the same kind of convenience and easily-obtainable/storable cartridges for just a couple hundred currency units per recorder and one or two coins per tape. I even used the family VCR myself in the mid 90s for recording some landmark long-form radio programmes, though I can't remember if that was after figuring out how to run a cable from the hi-fi to the deck, or just thanks to the local cable TV service including radio feeds on the channel list...
And if you went fully digital and made use of the video track itself (representing a much larger physical tape area), you could get far more material onto a tape. The first CD mastering systems actually used VHS as their recording stock, and the characteristic sampling rate is actually a byproduct of that: on a PAL tape, 44100 samples per second at two 16-bit values per sample means you need to record just 49 bits per active line (way less than what VHS can easily handle, especially if they're just straight black and white), maybe plus a few extra for error correction, and in fact the same for NTSC (fewer lines per frame, but more frames per second) - or at least, for a deck that can correctly record its monochrome predecessor standard of 60.00fps rather than the 59.94fps of colour (though for a while, there existed an option of recording at 44056Hz... ie, 44100/60 x 59.94... and some 90s audio editing software even included it as a selectable default rate... the assumption being that the tiny speedup on playback wouldn't be noticed).
Of course, that's getting full CD quality, in short-play. For radio recording you can quite happily compromise the quality quite a bit in return for extended recording time, and as absolute pristine error protection wasn't needed could likely squeeze more bits per line too. A backup-to-VHS system I used around the same time could easily double the density without losing data on a longplay tape (easily cramming in 8GB per cassette, so long as you were prepared to let it run overnight), and pushing that to 2.5 or 3x instead probably wouldn't have been an issue, especially as at the time I knew nothing of overscan and thought you had to keep the active data area within the visible boundaries of the screen. So that gets you the equivalent of 15 to 24 hours (2.5 x 2 x 3h, to 3 x 2 x 4h) of CD quality right off the bat, maybe with a few dropouts...
Reduce the sampling rate and depth to something closer to NICAM (32kHz and 14-compressed-to-10 bit, more than enough to faithfully reproduce FM Stereo material) and you could probably back that off quite a bit, allowing either use of the equivalent of Short Play recording density (obviously the recorder would have to be a timelapse type device, or have some kind of short term buffering with the buffer dumped to tape maybe a minute's worth at a time), and/or fewer bits per line, plus some error correction thrown in, all of which would improve its robustness, whilst still allowing you to economise down to just one tape (and one switch-over) per 24 hours. Knock it back to FM Mono and it'd be 48, and AM could easily be every 3.5 days / 2 per week, with a swap at midnight Sun/Mon and noon Thursday... or just once per week if you were OK with relatively poor (but still probably no worse than what was actually received by an average listener) 11~12kHz sample rate and 8-bit clarity (maybe with some A/mu-law companding)... Though again, the method by which you streamed the data onto the actual tape at as low as 1/21th (1/21st? 1/21stth?) the normal live longplay rate would be up for discussion. Perhaps a CCTV low framerate deck could be co-opted as the destination for pages of data constructed one frame at a time (not really more than 16kB worth, so could be easily double-buffered in a mere 32kB device) and repeatedly sent down the wire in sync with the machine's actual recording framerate...
@@markpenrice6253 could you repeat that please! 😁😁
I worked for AEI for 9 years, in the music programming department! Had a ProPac 4 at home, as well as the follow-up, the Pro-Disc. (More details, as requested, in replies to this comment)
Dream job!
Underrated comment. Follow up. Tell us more.
@@user-ny5vp9be8v will do - in the car right now, but there was more I wanted to say, so if there's interest, I'll spill it!
@@DJMikeBrady There is interest, I promise you that.
@@DJMikeBrady Please, tell us more!
Still got some of that non copyright music?
Your facial expressions during the four tracks, especially the christmas one, are priceless!
He had his flippin 'eak face on 😂
Was considering to comment on that.
21:24 LOL :D
yeah Hahahha
haha 😂😂😂😂😂😂
I was the head engineer for AEL music head quarters in Seattle WA. USA for 19 years. way back when they put out the music as 4 hour broad cast cart players like the Paragon 6 and then the Model 700. Then came the propac cassette System, then DBS satellite and custom CD players. In the end they were doing some computer hard drive systems. There is so much more to the cassette system, it would take a video of about 1 hour for me to tell all. But long story short, the UK ReadyFusion version that you have and tape you have may not have been quite up too AEI quality. I was the one that made all the custom mods to the high speed duplicating equipment and recording studios in the AEI headquarters. The proPac could play back audio with near flat response up to 14K and we made sure that our mastering equipment and dupping equipment were tested and aligned all the time. I also worked with The japan company that custom built the ProPac player, this was fun as it meant trips to Japan. Doing all the custom mods to the duplicating equipment was fun as well, nothing like some giving you $100K of equipment and letting you take it apart and rebuild it for special speeds and EQ setting. We used chrome tape in the USA cassetts and the cassette shells were selected from 100's of cassette shells that were always being tested to find the best shell to use. They are not all the same . Not even close.
Hey, you might like the video I've just popped up, pretty much based around the rediffusion kit I've got and that was installed in the UK :) my propac tapes are a bit newer, so some of them are DMX branded!
PLEASE upload the contents of that four hour tape, it's ridiculously relaxing
Check this: th-cam.com/video/dx42LZ2vzY4/w-d-xo.html
it's called "downtempo music", "future jazz"... maybe it helps you. I know I listen this when I need to chillout. :)
@@cristic767 yeah but we want the legit stuff that wasn't *made* to Sound like this: the original.
sounds like a bunch of midi files :P lol.
The first deck summing the channels into two mono feeds makes sense for BGM. How many times have I been sitting in a pub and just heard a drum track for 3 minutes. A hard panned mix and the left speaker with the rest of the song could be anywhere.
It also makes sense if you're in a supermarket or department store where the audio is being heard through ceiling speakers placed throughout the building. You wouldn't need stereo audio for that.
@@benjaminvlz Not only do you not need stereo for that, if you attempted playing stereo music when people are moving around a lot they will experience phase issues where the music will sound weird and go in and out depending on where they're standing between the two speakers. Background music must almost always be mono.
when I started at Mtv in london, we had a live show in the evenings (ray cokes) & we had an audio feed back from TX into the studio foldback. it was only the left channel (reasons of cheapness mostly), & no-one had noticed, far less complained, until lenny kravitz came in... while he was waiting to be interviewed, TX were playing one of his hits, & he was frowning. I was doing sound that night, & in the next ad break I was summoned to speak to kravitz. he was worried that the video had been playing out over & over with half of the mix missing; I reassured him. close call though. he might've gone highly strung & walked.
@@duncan-rmi I know for a lot of satellite uplink interviews the guest gets the studio ifb audio fed back to them via regular telephone. Saves money on uplink costs and it cuts the delay in half.
There should be an arrow pointing to the person who picked the music on the jukebox.
That telephone icon on the tape suggests to me that this was marketed specifically for On Hold music in office telephone systems.
I think that's just there to tell people to ring the number beneath when they need to contact the company (0800 being a freephone number) - but this system could be used on phones too.
@@Techmoan The 4 track tape machines for the blind that came from the library services for the blind could probably store even more as it slowed the tapes down too.
I've watched so much Techmoan over the years I feel like he's my adoptive uncle whom I've never met.
Strange feeling!
Keep up the quality content.
😂
In the late 90s, I worked for a company that installed bgm systems (and fruit machines) in pubs.
The bgm machine we used had a plastic 'ski slope' accessory - at the end of playing a side, the tape machine would eject the tape sideways into the ski slope - it would push the other tapes up and the top one would flip over, slide back down and load into the tape deck to play the other side
Techmoan one of the few channels that more times then not teaches me something I did not know about technology, instead of spewing out the same dribble 100 other channels have done. :-)
7:46 I can confirm background music setups like that were absolute hell. I remember taking on a temp job at Macy's during the Christmas holiday shopping season and listening to same 20 Christmas songs on repeat from November to mid December was pretty maddening. The playlist never changed so it got to a point where I could predict what song would come up next.
The ProPac 4+ takes me back to my first job working as a waiter in a hotel restaurant in London in the the early 90's. We had one of those running day and night. The Christmas tape was particularly grim ( the song choices, the stretched tape and the endless repeats) If there is a hell and I end up there I expect that will be the soundtrack they have in the background.
We had to make the Christmas programs from April to July, in order for them to be duplicated in time to hit the stores by September. It was brutal... And as far as song selection, oh man... Most Christmas songs are only in the 2 minute range, so we had to come up with as many as 30 per track, then there were non duplicate rules about songs AND artists, there were certain record labels we were required to use at a certain minimum percentage, and others we weren't allowed to use at all. And then, if you were an account that got custom programming, we were at the mercy of your director of visual merchandising, who would make us redo the entire program if they didn't like one song.
Believe me, the programmers felt your pain.
@@DJMikeBrady Ha! I never thought of it from the programmers side, although I'm not sure you really got the horror of listening to it for weeks at a time endlessly like we did. I can say by January the programmers would have definitely felt my pain if I could have got my hands on them! Anyway it was a long time ago and it would seem pretty churlish of me to hold a grudge this long, I forgive you and your crimes against music! Thanks for the reply, it cheered me up👍
@@1791greg We definitely felt your pain, because each programmer had to make 4 - 6 Christmas programs each year, sometimes even more... So it was the equivalent of your September to January, but ours was April to July... 🤣 Oh and I forgot another miserable aspect of the custom programs - these guys would usually get there last couple years' programs as well as the new one, so we had to be VERY aware of what was programmed the previous years and not repeat against those either. Holy crap it was awful!
@@DJMikeBrady it doesn't sound like a picnic although my lasting memory of that music was spending my first Christmas day away from home, working a split shift (breakfast and dinner) with a terrible hangover and feeling quite emotionally fragile about how I had ended up in this situation and listening to that music. I think we've all been scarred for life by that company!
@@1791greg lol... It was my dream job, but by the time they merged with another company and I was laid off in the process, it was a classic blessing in disguise... It took me a year or so before I could actually listen to music just for enjoyment, without analyzing what accounts it would be good for. ALMOST makes up for my current career in IT.
That AEI non-copyright music sounds like it belongs in the TH-cam Audio Library.
It sounded more like the soundtrack of an eighties porn movie.
Just store the tape for 20 more years in the attic and voila: *VAPORWAVE*
@@Wulff291186 Now that you've mentioned it, that background music does sound like something that would be good to use as samples in vaporwave music.
I've used the TH-cam Audio Library to avoid copyright strikes... It's a useful resource for TH-camrs!
I do wonder if any of that is stuff I could find in the stock music library I’m subscribed to.
I was lucky- I used to work in Woolworths and we just played random CDs and changed them whenever we got bored, plenty of chart music and compilation albums to choose from- I feel sorry for shop workers stuck listening to 'store radio' over and over again...
A skill you will probably never use again? Flippin' 'eck! You could make counterfeit Beatles AEI tapes and make a mint!
That was my first thought too
AEI - I used to work for them in Chicago. Talk about a flashback. FYI, prior to cassette it was a 1/4" format.
@@vwestlife yeah those were being phased out. I installed their satellite receivers mostly. I replaced a lot of broken microphones. We had service contracts with a lot of restaurants and clothing stores.
AEI mixed tempo synthwave compilation!
Yeah, that tape is halfway to vaporwave standards already.
The montage of the AEI Propack 4+ really reminded me of the openings to Grand Theft Auto 3 and Vice City.
Worked at Woolworths supermarket full time for a few years back in the early 90's.
The store had a similar unit that used two cassettes and would play the same tracks of "adult contemporary rock" all day, every day, over and over.
Hearing Crocodile Rock or Hotel California (to name just two) again makes me run screaming into the street!!
Oh and Bing Crosby's Christmas album from September until mid January was truly unforgettable.
Thankyou for showcasing one of the offending torture devices and the rock solid build quality that ensured many, many people developed a deep seated hatred of certain program material!
Classical Christmas Reggae should be a genre
That music from the ProPac4+ brings back memories.
Of what, I have no idea, it just triggers the feeling of remembrance.
14:22 About the maths: they're running it 25% slower, so at 75% or 3/4 normal speed. Since the time is the inverse of speed (time = length / speed), you flip the fraction upside down to get a time of 4/3 original speed (or 1 and 1/3). This is how the 25% speed decrease turns into a 33% time increases.
A long time ago I started a retail job. They had the same 6 or 7 songs playing on repeat. After a couple of days of it I eventually went to the store manager and said "Does it not bother you that we're only playing the same few songs over and over." She looked at me seemingly oblivious and asked "Really? The same songs? ...I'll speak to head office..."
Later that day the old playlist was gone and replaced with a far more varied one. I have no idea how long they'd been listening to those 7 songs on repeat, or how they hadn't noticed before I brought it up. I was practically tearing my hair out after one day of it! To this day if I ever hear any of those songs I feel like strangling someone.
I knew how they worked before I clicked, but I just needed to see Techmoan's magical explaination.
Snag, Snap & Stretch - they're the firm of solicitors I use
They have a new partner, a Mrs Break ...
Surely a brand of cheap underpants? 😅
Well, better than the law firm of Dewey, Cheatam, & Howe at any rate. 😛
That R&B/Mozart mashup actually sounded pretty good for a bit!
One of my first jobs was working retail in a clothing store over the christmas period. The 'BGM Machine' was a CD player hooked up to speakers around the store...and it was broken. I listened to the same 4 christmas songs on repeat for 10 hours a day, every day for nearly six weeks.
That was 25 years ago, and I still feel physically sick if I hear 'Rockin Around the Christmas Tree'
Please upload that entire four hour non copyright casette! I can feel the rhythm in my veins!!
I worked at Wilko once, it was a brand new store and I was a supervisor and so was involved in building the shop interior. The music for the store is streamed on a Samsung mobile phone, lol.
@Chao772 Productions It was a brand new store, so it's probably a cheaper way of them doing it? It was literally a Samsung mobile phone hooked up to 4G, haha. Opened around 2-3 years ago now. :)
That's very odd. It used to be Imagesound that done Wilko.
Yeah, it was a new store in around 2018, so I am not sure if Imagesound still did it or not. Imagesound does ring a bell though. But it was a Samsung mobile phone with some custom ROM on it, making it a dedicated streaming device, with music controlled by head office.
@@jezzermeii Cool!
Any chance you will release the full AEI tape?
telecomguy10 the vaguest possible chance that anyone could manually flag it and tank his channel with a copyright strike is probably going to prevent that
@@plushifoxed It says "Non Copyright" on the tape, so I *hope* it'd be okay.
@@valshaped These days 'Non Copyright' spells 'free to claim' for copyright terrorists.
@@plushifoxed 'and tank his channel ' There are places to put things other than TH-cam..
@@ModelLights I think he has a secondary channel, or I think he used to called TH-cam Pendat, where he usually posted some novelty videos like that. He posted the D-Theater footage on there with copyrighted music. And he also linked where you could find the muppet outro videos and the muppet videos are unlisted.
The tape sounds like a great vaporwave album, wear and tear over time have applied all the filters and effects needed :D Please upload the whole thing!
Absolutely. I need this exactly as it is.
Definitely not vapourwavy enough. Needs some more synths and a beat.
@@3rdalbum not necessarily, but it does need slowed down a bit
VapourTwat
10:00 I guess this is what every Mall in the 1990s used. I love it.
When I was in grade school, I tried to build a similar device, except mine was supposed to store either 8 hours in stereo, or 16 hours in mono, using parts salvaged from an 8 track player and a VCR, using video tape. The goal was to create a small boombox sized device that would be powered by a motorcycle battery, that could play continuous music for a long upcoming week long class trip... Unfortunately, I never found a VCR to salvage in time for the trip. I wanted one of the old style top loading ones, for ease of hacking. Fate just didnt work out for me. A few years later I started recording music onto ZIP discs, and then MP3s came around, and I officially gave up on the project.
Hmm... Thinking about it, I think one of the things that also had me held up was the difference in tape width. I might have even been considering putting two 8 track player heads in, to double the capacity. A physical switch would have toggled between stereo heads A and B. The program selection was a mechanical thing for the 8 track player I had salvaged. The head actually moved between the 4 program track positions. Had I gotten the top loading VCR, and a second 8 track player, I have no doubt I could have done it. The catch would have been erasing. I would have had to bulk erase the tapes, then record onto them sequentially, the way the program would play out. Mistakes would have been unrecoverable, since I had no way to selectively erase tracks. Still, it would have been a cool device to have in 1991!
Even though I now have a 2005 iPod Mini upgraded to flash with a 128GB micro SD card and an SD to CF adapter, I still think about that never finished project now and then... Usually when seeing crazy multitrack formats on your channel! :D
They had a machine similar to this in the branch of Electronics Boutique I was working at in 2001. Hours of music on one tape, yet I still have Feels So Good by Sonique stuck in my head after all these years.
Nice device but i like that big 70ties machine with the caroussel, you showed us earlier, even more! I love how you really get into the technical background of these weird machines. Well done!
I was thinking that one of those would make a better background music system for a pub, mall, supermarket etc, but I guess it would involve producing a *lot* more tapes (all of which would need to be mini if being played over a large multi-speaker system) and might be more prone to mechanical issues too. On balance, I think this was probably the best solution at that point in time. But yes, it would have worked.
This would be the perfect machine to play Technology Connections' [adjective] Smooth Jazz.
You could be reviewing a rotten potato from the 1980's - and I'd still watch as I know ya would find a way of making it interesting.
bruh that's what ashens does
6:34 cutest of notices that I ever seen xD
In the 90s, the community radio station I worked at used VHS. An extended tape that would play during the evening when everyone went home for the night.
Hifi VHS was an excellent choice for high quality audio when you didn't have DAT or something better. The Hifi VHS dynamic range, noise, etc were all nearly CD quality under the right circumstances, and of course VHS tapes were cheap and could have long playback time.
This was fun! AEI Music Network Inc. was based out of Seattle, and back in the '90s, everyone in a garage band knew that the dumpster in the back alley was filled with hundreds of discarded cassette tapes. We'd drive up to Capitol Hill and fill up our parents' station wagons with seemingly unlimited stocks of free recording media. I'm sure there's a ton of grunge bands that put out their first demos on AEI tapes. Looking back, it's pretty astounding they dumped so much product. We never came back empty handed...
That 90s contemporary music was so 80s anime, I want to go watch some right now.
Holy shit I absolutely adore that background music, anywhere where you can download it?
Edit: Jesus guys why the hell does everything on this platform have to devolve into an argument? If you don't like vaporwave so be it, but like keep it to yourself. I don't even consider myself a fan of vaporwave I shouldn't have to defend it
i need it too!
And thanks to that tape format there could be HOURS of it. I _need_ me this bottled 90s mall synth.
Neo_Corgski duuuddee I neeeeedddd thatttt
Seriously, he needs to dump that tape. (And it does say it's non-copyrighted!) If the samples he played were representative, that tape would be a goldmine for the vaporwave/mallsoft/etc crowd.
Vaporwave is fantastic
Techmoan doesn't look like a Maths teacher, he looks like a Geography teacher. You know that teacher who you look at and think he'll be crap but then it turns out his lessons are awesome and he cracks jokes about the maths teachers.
DJ Techmoan dropping a BGM mixtape is all I wanted.
7:10 welcome to my day job (satellite radio but it's still the same 8 songs every day for 4 years now)
It leaves one with a tough choice... Do I commit suicide, or murder? : )
Great stuff! I was working in a club in late 90's and their choice for long autoplay background music was quite innovative. Hi-fi VHS deck on half speed could deliver massive 8 hours of songs! And the sound quality was impressive too.
I'm not quite sure exactly why I love this channel so much but I just can't stop watching.
We did press the channel button, when one of the tracks we really hated came on and we were near enough to the office where the ProPac lived…
I did copy one of the tapes once, and I must have it somewhere in my pile of tapes I can no longer listen to as I don’t have a player!
A long time ago I worked in a small leisure centre. The manager refused to play anything but a single CD, which was Simply Red's Stars.
On repeat.
For the *three years* I was there
I'd give it all up for you
I'd give it all up for you...
Sorry, something got me started.
@@stonedsavage7814 It was over 25 years ago, so no, but after those three years? Yeah I could sing the whole album.
@@3rdalbum That's just evil
wow...
Love the grimace at the Christmas music. I think we all did the same!
Whenever I hear xmas music, I temporarily lose my will to live.
I worked in a grocery store that played a small selection of oldies over and over. I don't work there anymore, but the sheer number of times I heard Tell Her About It by Billy Joel did indeed drive me crazy.
17:04 I cant resist... but OMG what beautiful handwriting... I've never seen such accurately written/drawn numbers - the 8's and 9's are awesome... I also like how number 5 is like an 'S'
Nice video. Background music for a Elevator, Grocery Stores, Waiting Rooms...
Shopping channels , old instructional films...
...the places where one goes, to die.
Dude, you need to upload the original tape
@@UglyMagenta Concur
Yeah!
Same.
I agree, could you please upload this. i yearn for it
Yes! Those songs around the 9:30 mark are BANGERS
Outstanding! I only miss the puppets at the end to be perfect. I think they arguing at 25% higher and lower speed should be hilarious. Thanks for taking part of the best time of my day.
I am a master procrastinator, and your channel is one of my main tools in achieving this! :o)
Things haven’t necessarily improved, even if the technology is better.
I worked as a night shift janitor at an Indian casino for a few months last year. Most of the time, they had the same forty or so songs playing. The gamblers probably didn’t notice, but working there every night, I definitely did. I’m actually kind of glad I lost that job. If I had to listen to “Young Dumb & Broke” or “Despacito” one more time, I might have given them a legitimate reason to fire me instead of the one they cooked up.
Yeah, I worked at a riverboat casino for about 9 months. 8 hours/day 5 nights/week....
I typically go on pre-Christmas holidays to remote Scottish hotels (I like bleak and miserable, okay). These hotels will typically have a single Christmas mixtape... and it's always the same one. I've very nearly memorised the order of the tracks on it and if I have to listen to it one more time I won't be responsible for my actions.
Why on earth would put "Young Dumb & Broke" on the playlist at a *casino??*
@@anononomous Those who aren't young can imagine they are, and us who are young like the bleak reality of our futures acknowledged.
@@anononomous Probably the same people who think "How Soon Is Now" is appropriate bar music.
21:27 That look lol. What was going through your mind?
I was thinking how it probably wasn’t the best choice of song to use.
Wait. How did you comment way before the video was officially live? Patreon feature?
@@LBPreviews Yep.
"IT'S F***ING MAY"
Looked a little like this is the worst cover I’ve ever heard!
For the other commenters Patreon allow early access to videos as an incentive. Surprised how many people notice the time stamp but never read the description box with a link to Patreon which allows early access.
Matt, you are awesome. Honestly (I know I say this a lot) there's not a single video upload you've done that I haven't either learned something or simply enjoyed watching. Brilliant stuff as always.
International treasure surely!
This brings back fond memories; I worked in a shop in my youth and they had one of these systems installed, as a music fan I got so annoyed with the dreadful cover versions that I took one of the tapes home and "reverse engineered" it to work out how they managed to cram that much music onto a single tape. Eventually I was able to create my own versions by using Sony SoundForge (it might even have been Sonic Foundry SoundForge back then) to create the requisite format by creating two mono channels per side and muxing them into a stereo stream and increasing the speed (around 30% from memory) to match the slower playback speed of the deck. I then simply recorded over one of the AEI tapes and job done. Cue happy staff (let's ignore the copyright implications for now!)
We learn so much from you. Thank you so much for your efforts.
Another great video. I think Techmoans take on all the audio and video broadcast formats would be incredible. The analogue and digital reel to reel audio formats of the 80s and even video formats Umatic, 1 and 2 inch, Betacam, Digital Betacam and Hd Betacam.
It's like Techmoan is a modern day version of Tomorrow's World... but with vintage technology!
@@stephenemmett9753 it is YESTERDAYS world!
That would be a rather expensive project if he bought the machines on Ebay as usual! The early broadcast VTR's were the size of a small shed. Maybe a trip to an archive transfer facility would be a bit more practical
Really appreciate the analog whiteboard presentation about the analog music format 🤘
Really like the compact,minimalist design of the tape deck at 5:58. Smart kit.
I learned everything I know about maths from Professor Techmoan.
6:35 sign at the bottom says - "sorry about the focus" :)
Yes because those who can't tell it's out of focus won't see the message, that's why it was small...
My first job at a Little Chef, and we had one of the AEI machines with those tapes! Strange little bit of nostalgia there, thanks for this video! - Adam
There was a guy who had a documentary about him on BBC Radio 3 a few years ago. He was a radio DJ nut, he used to make his own radio shows from home and put them on cassette tapes for his family and friends to listen too. His radio shows never appeared on radio only on cassette. What he used to do was record his shows onto real to real tape but then master them to normal cassette. What he did was record the parts of the show to the separate channel of the tape. So he would record part one of his show in mono to the left side channel, and another part to the right also in mono. He would do this to the other side of the tape, to have 4 parts of his radio show onto the tape which played at 45 minutes for each part of the show. The tape could be played in a normal Hifi system, so if you wanted to listen to part 1, you would pan your speakers to the left. And to listen to part 2 pan your speakers to the right and so forth. His show was called The Sunnyside Up Show, but it never appeared on radio only cassette, it was a hobby of his and he did it for many years. He was good as a radio presenter, he got a job interview for a local radio station once, but he failed the interview because he was very nervous during the interview. It would have been his dream job.
a continuous loop of bad cover songs played in the exact same order every day? yeah, that's basically what working at Party City was like
My first experience of long term exposure to background music was working at a DIY retailer in the UK as a summer job from university over 30 years ago. Specially created for the chain, the music was interspersed with special offer announcements. It repeated about four to six times a day (sorry I can't remember the exact playtime).Did it drive the staff bonkers? Yes it did!
@@thedoc.6819 I've known people who worked at Asda who used the exact same tape/file for their background music. Apparently the only reprieve was when it was changed for Christmas a few weeks a year. Just like your scenario, the same order of announcements, tunes, everything.
It sounds unbearable for me. I mean, playing the same music over and over is done for legitimate torture ("enhanced interrogation" my foot), so I don't really understand why employers are allowed to do that. Is it just because the loop is a few hours rather than a single song or album? Is it because you get to go home after a while theoretically? (Overtime being even worse then...).
I can understand a shop having bought broadcast rights to only so much music, but at least being able to put it on shuffle world be some reprieve, which if I was making legislation (I'm glad I'm not, but if I was) I would make mandatory. They could still tell it to play from the announcements playlist every x songs. And I suppose while I'm playing dictator I'd make the broadcast rights easier to obtain so the BGM playlist could be longer than one person's shift.
Would downloading all of the TH-cam Audio Library or someone like Kevin MacLeod's work be legal for those shops to do? That could help things along a bit.
Now I'm reminded of how Frankie & Benny's plays the exact same tracks in the exact same order too. For a while it was the only place in my small town that served their kind of food and after going once or twice a month for a while I had to stop going just because of the damn music!
I worked in a factory in the mid 80's and they looped the same 4 songs day in day out for the 2 months I was there. You wernt allowed to bring in a walkman or anything so had to endure this ghastly selection of awful pap 30 odd times a shift. If i ever hear `you make me feel brand new` the flashbacks start....horrible flashbacks. Im amazed they were allowed to do it to be honest, it really angried up the blood to the point that it was a distraction.
@@meetoo594 Jesus. Everyone I know who had a factory job in the 90s or 00s was encouraged to bring portable stereos.. one of the people who worked at an Asda switched to a production line for that very reason :s
@@kaitlyn__L This was an electronics fabrication plant and before wireless headphones were a thing so I guess it was for health and safety reasons i.e. getting the cord tangled in a pillar drill or not hearing the fire alarms.
I really appreciate all the work you put into every single one of your videos Mat! Great job as always 🙌🏼👏🏼
09:35 somehow this looks almost like an advert for that thing, with all the text to it and connected with that music it really reminds me of some of the 1990s introduction videos that you got for cars for example, that showed you all the new functions and their advantages and stuff underlined with funky music you could never get anywhere else XD
Another way to record BGM in the tape days was actually to record music onto a VHS tape and play them back using a VCR. A local radio station in my neighbourhood had lots of VHS tapes with 8 hours worth of music which they would start at the end of their last live show to play the music during the night and up until their first live hour in the morning again. They had recorded the music onto 240 mins VHS tapes in LP to get 480 minutes. This was before automation systems on pc became the standard.
In the 1990s, I recorded some special cassettes with four monaural programmes at standard speed. They could be listened to on any Walkman using a special adaptor I made, which had a switch to send either just the left or right signal from the socket to both headphones at once. I also connected a battery holder with two D cells to the mains adaptor socket. It was very useful on long journeys!
That poster in the background always reminds me of the Lateralus artwork.
I used to work in a shop with a similar system.it really did drive you mad after hearing it so many times.but....you got a break at christmas time when the music was altered to Christmas tunes .......deep joy .great video by the way !!
I worked at a rent to own furniture store. Our TV shelf was hooked up to a DVD player that played music videos all day. Toby Keith, Miranda Lambart, Eric Church...
"Nothing against him, (Michael McDonald live DVD perpetually playing at Smart Tech) if I have to listen to Yah-Mo be There one more one time, I'm going to Yah-Mo burn this place to the ground." 40 Year old Virgin, Paul Rudd's character. th-cam.com/video/l7Vo_t7zbeQ/w-d-xo.html
Your videos are pure joy to watch! thank you!
oh my god it would be so amazing if we could get that entire ambient muzak propak tape, with the wonkiness and everything (plsssssssssss)
A E S T H E T I C af
My first thought when seeing a new Techmoan video... "Ok! *gets comfy in chair*, here we go!
I used to work for Boots (the Chemists) and up until I left there in 2015, many stores were still using CD as a way of playing music in store and I knew one which used to use a cassette adaptor to play music from an iPod.
It's always a good day when there's a new techmoan video!
The personal computer: giving the middle finger to proprietary formats since 1990.
Is Wav. a format? Well it not physical but I think it counts.
@@lundsweden *.wav is a compressed audio format. Not a very good one, but good enough for video games and system sounds until better were developed. You had to pay to have the software to read it and compress into it. There were shareware versions of the software, but since it was mainly used in the age of BBS and dial-up, very few people didn't use the commercial option.
The retirement home I used to work at had one of these. They used it up until 2004 when I left. I remember changing the tapes for holidays or special events. Stuck in my mind because I’ve always loved cassettes. Thanks for bringing back some fond memories.
I used to work for Solo (which became Somerfield Stores Ltd) in the 1990's and our branch had a machine similar to the second one featured. We had some fabulous cassettes of 60's through 80's pop music and used to 'crank' up the volume and have customers singing and almost dancing in the aisles! It made it a pleasure to go to work. Brought back lots of memories - thank you Techmoan.
Really appreciate the time you dedicate to your video content and your editing. I adore seeing all this old music tech. Really like your intro and outro too!
I couldn't agree with you more.
Best wake-up notification on a bank holiday Monday, ever.
Can you post your top 10 wake-up notifications for a bank holiday Monday? I'd love to explore them.
I love how you can use a free program and computer to replicate what they did in the studio to record to these tapes, but so much more effortlessly.
@@edwin3928ohd that's my auto-self-like plugin
Our music player at work has a CD stuck in it so we only have what it already has downloaded on it and that CD (company doesn't want yo fix it). We snooped around found out there was an aux input so we could just get an aux cord and play music from our phones. The day we found that out I had tears of joy. It was getting to the point where even Customers were commenting on the repeating music!
Should def archive that tape somewhere. Great fodder for vaporwave. Say what you will about vaporwave, but there are a lot of geniunely good artists out there.
Step 1 Make a 4 hour long Beatles tape.
Step 2 Profit.
I always love these videos about tapes and tape decks. As a teen, I spent countless hours working with systems just like these while working for a church. As I got to keep any old broken equipment that I could fix, I ended up making my own tapes with modern rock. So this episode in particular brought back a lot of memories.
I remember when this tech was in it's heyday here in the US. When going to K-Mart and getting an Icee was the highlight of my week as a young man. Once the online shopping started and retail began to die, there was nothing worse than hearing these worn out recordings playing in empty stores while they were preparing to close the doors for good...
Now you can start producing and distributing music for those machines, Matt. :)
You could even rent/lease the tapes out as you mentioned what they did too.
I picked up something cool at a flea market. It was a kenwood kd 74f automatic turntable! It was 20 Canadian dollars!
What a brilliant section where tech moan uses audacity to create a 4-hour type cassette! Very entertaining! We all love techmoan
10 minutes in. Incredible, remember working in a furniture retail store with this synth music playing. This was about 2001.