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.
I had a ghettoblaster with tape-to-tape at some point in the '80s and certainly copied a couple of albums that way - but I’ve never really been into music that much, so it wouldn’t have been many.
Prior to that we did have a horrible old mono tape recorder which I used to record some HHGTTG episodes on it’s original radio transmission by standing it beside the radio and begging the family to be quiet. I may even have those tapes somewhere - for sentimental value. They were appalling quality as you would expect.
I too had a ghetto blaster, which must sound pretty weird to people young enough to have never heard of them.
My folks had a ghetto blaster when I was growing up, and I thought it was a cool name - completely unaware of the racial implications
One day I was talking to a friend who also grew up in the CD era, and the topic steers towards my dad’s ghetto blaster. They grew very concerned and were like, “Is everything okay at home, does your dad have a manifesto, should we call the police or something?”
Even though they definitely knew what a boombox was, they thought I was talking about a TEC-9. I no longer call a boombox a ghetto blaster.
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.
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!
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.
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.
No, I did not have access to a cassette tape recorder until 90 or 91.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Mix tapes were the primary thing for me, and later burning custom CDs in the mid 90s.
I was the only one with a CD burner and I’d charge people $1 song to make them (I provided the CDs)
I think most people were annoyed by the radio DJ talking through an intro/outro because of recording your own mixtape. I still hear some phantom DJs in songs even though the tapes have long been lost to time.
Weird thing, there are many songs in Brazil that have a “DJ <whatever>” mixed in the middle of the track. Not a radio DJ, just some rando that got the music, put his name there and shared around. Not something from the 80s, but from 2000 onwards, tho, still around today
Seems that narcissistic disorder is not limited to presidents…
That’s why they would do it. Some live DJs still do, even though radio taping is long gone.
