General Cassette Info and Tips:

TABS OUT CASSETTE SHELLS

Cassette tapes supplied without recording tabs out upon the top edge of the cassette shell are referred to as ‘pre-recorded’ shells and are intended to prevent accidental erasure of material by the end-user. Professional high speed cassette recorders can record onto either ‘tab in’ or ‘tab out’ cassette shells.

To record onto ‘tab out’ shells on a standard cassette recorder simply cover the holes with a small piece of sticky tape or blu-tac to enable your machine to enter record mode and remove after recording for a professional appearance. Alternatively if you have many tapes to copy you could place a piece of blu-tac inside your cassette recorder upon the plastic arm which falls into the hole in the cassette when you close the door. Sounds tricky but it really isn’t difficult to find it. Place the blu-tac on the arm to stop it moving and the machine will switch into record mode for all types of cassettes.

A ‘pre-recorded’ ‘tab out’ cassette shell has a much more professional appearance for the end user or point of sale than a ‘tab-in’ shell which has either the tab left in place or removed with a small piece of broken plastic visible.

However, should the tapes be intended to be re-recorded or recycled the ‘tab-in’ option would perhaps be more suitable.

WELDED SHELLS or SCREWED

A welded cassette shell has the two halves  of the cassette sonic welded together all the way round making it more rigid and slightly more reliable than a shell with the two halves screwed together at 5 points. A welded cassette shell has a more professional appearance due to most of the welded shells are ‘tab out’ and the majority of the music and publishing  industries have used this type of cassette for their major releases.

A screwed together cassette shell does however have the advantage of the ability to repair a broken, twisted or snapped tape by unscrewing the 2 halves and cutting out the damaged part of tape, re-splicing and screwing the shell back together. This makes the shell popular for any important recordings or masters.

We offer a free repair service for any customers who have a welded cassette which they cannot repair the broken tape.

For most applications either welded or screwed shells are suitable and much decision is down to personal choice.

TAPE LENGTH, THICKNESS and HUMIDITY

This combination can cause problems in warm weather. The best recording and reliability situation would be a short length on thick coated tape in cool conditions but that is rarely the mix as longer tape lengths require thinner tape which in turn reacts more to temperature changes. To be brief the best advice would be to try and stay below C100 minutes in tape lengths and avoid storing and recording in any extreme temperatures to reduce the risk of tape jamming, tape twists or breakages. In general though the audio cassette is a very tough and durable product and can equally match and better many modern day media carriers in terms of survival.