Audio Cassette

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File Format
Name Audio Cassette
Ontology

Some audio cassettes

Some audio cassettes

An audio cassette, AKA "Compact Cassette", was a popular medium for sound recording from the mid-1960s through the 1990s, introduced by Philips as one of the formats for compact audio tapes, in competition with the DC International Cassette and the rather obscure Sanyo Tape Cartridge (also marketed as the Sears Tape Cartridge). Originally designed for such uses as office dictation (replacing earlier technologies such as the Dictabelt), it eventually achieved greater sound quality to permit it to be used for music, both for home recording, where it replaced reel-to-reel tape decks, and for sales of prerecorded music, where it was used alongside 8-Track tapes and vinyl records, and later CDs. Like all physical media, it has declined in use in recent years in favor of digital data.

In early home and hobby computers of the 1970s and 1980s, audio cassettes were often used as a data storage medium, until disk drives became sufficiently available and affordable to become the dominant means of storage.

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Data formats

A number of early personal computers used audio cassettes to store programs and data. See also Magnetic tape data storage. There was even some use of vinyl records as a means of storing data in similar format to cassettes.

There was also (at least) one method of storing video data on an audio cassette: the Fisher-Price PXL-2000 toy camcorder used audio cassettes as the recording medium.

Sticky-shed syndrome

Sticky-shed syndrome is a condition created by the deterioration of the binders in a magnetic tape, which hold the iron oxide magnetizable coating to its plastic carrier.

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