8-track tape is very weird. <\/p>\n
The tape is “endless”– it spools around a single reel, and unrolls from the center of the reel. Kinda crazy. A side effect of this is you cannot rewind the tape. There’s a fast-forward, but no rewind. Since the tape is circular, you don’t have to wait for the tape to rewind; once the last song on your track is over, you will already be back at the beginning.<\/p>\n
There are 4 (stereo) tracks on a single tape. Each track is considered a “program,” and all 4 programs are playing simultaneously, sort of like having 4 radio stations playing at the same time. Since there is no rewind… if your favorite song on Track 3 is in the same place as your favorite song on Track 4, you’re going to have to do a low of fast-forwarding. My deck has a “program” button on it which switches between tracks\/programs.<\/p>\n
A “Repeat” button makes the track play over again instead of going to the next track.<\/p>\n
There is no “stop” button, nor a “play” button. The closest you get is a “pause” button. The way you start playing a tape is you shove the tape in. The way you stop playing a tape is you yank it out of the player.<\/p>\n
So I asked my friend Steve
\nBRAIN: how do you know where you are in a program?
\nSTEVE: You don’t. You just wait for the song you want to play again. 8-Track is sort of based on you knowing the songs on your tape already.
\nBRAIN: This sucks!<\/p>\n
I’m listening to a tape my grandparents used to listen to.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
8-track tape is very weird. The tape is “endless”– it spools around a single reel, and unrolls from the center of the reel. Kinda crazy. A side effect of this is you cannot rewind the tape. There’s a fast-forward, but no rewind. Since the tape is circular, you don’t have to wait for the tape […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5887","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-stardate"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.ikillspies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5887","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.ikillspies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.ikillspies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.ikillspies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.ikillspies.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5887"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.ikillspies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5887\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.ikillspies.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5887"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.ikillspies.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5887"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.ikillspies.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5887"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}