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I’m just amazed to hear they were made up until 1988.

"Do They Still Make 8 Track Tapes?" is really a double question, ie, do they make PRERECODED tapes or BLANK tapes? I see no reason for having prerecorded ones, but if you have an 8-Track deck & want to use it, you'd want blank tapes.

YOU CAN FASTFORWARD!!

I never liked streaming for music, too many issues

Back in the early 80s I knew a lot of people who had those adaptors since most of our cars we had were like more than 5 years old. I even had one.

I have an 8-track player with a fast forward button. I can even pause the tape.

My mom had an 8-Track player attached to a stereo that was a piece of furniture unto its own. The one thing I remember is if you put cartridges in, you could hear a snapping sound as the player went to the next track.

I just bought standard Hitachi 60 minute mostly. Amazing I do still have a TDK still in plastic wrap. It's a 90 minute. Has a big " B " on the front and says Normal position Type 1 low noise high output high precision cassette mechanism. Bar code 4 902030 026264

One good thing I can think to mention about the 8track (I mean the cart and the player), is that, if neither one was a substandard piece of shit, the sound could be as warm and smooth as velvet. <-- This was not the norm tho. Most of the time, we all thought the format was a bad idea that shouldn't have been introduced. Watch as your player eats the tape. Watch as the tape gets into the works, like a tape worm, and the two components end up wrecking each other.

The first "home stereo" system I ever had came with an 8 track player (when I was a teen) and so when I bought my first car 60's Mustang (back in the 80s) it still had an 8 track in it so I already had a collection of 8 tracks. I loved it.

Yes. I bought Dolly Parton's Christmas album on one and several of Nancy Sinatra's reissued albums on 8 Track this year. I have not watched the video, sorry. OK, I watched part of the video and *no* there is a company that still makes these tapes in the Midwest using a duplicator .... same with the newer cassettes. I have never stopped playing tapes. I have a very nice 8 track (recorder, that fast forwards), Sony Cassette, Sony open reel, I play it all. Never had an issue with a tape breaking and none of them look like they do in this video. Mine are all still very nice and clean. Some tape and depending on the deck sound pretty good!

The main problems with 8 tracks were tape spillage and cartridge to player alignment. If 8 tracks could have been like radio station 4 tracks, what are very similar, they would have been much more reliable. On a 4 track, the rubber pinch roller wheel is part of the machine, and swings up through a big hole in the cartridge, instead of 8 track rollers being built into the cartridge, what creates a major difference, 4 tracks never have alignment or tape spillage problems. In the 1960's and 70's era, radio station jingles and advertisements were on 4 track cartridges that looked and worked just like 8 tracks with a cue tone that stopped the tape when it looped around

The only SHM-CD I own is Ambrosia - Somewhere I've Never Travelled, released in 2011. Not only is there is no perceptible difference in sound quality from the regular CD released in 2000, but the peak levels and dynamic range are identical. The only difference was the price - almost 4 times the cost. There may be differences in sound for other albums, but that is likely due to the mastering, not the "Super High Material", which in my opinion is snake oil.

I'm hunting down Cheap Tricks 2009 8track called " the latest". Newest one i know of

The streets were littered with tapes that had jammed and were tossed out the window of the car. They were everywhere.

I have an 8 track player as part of my home theater/audio set up.

I have a reel to reel with a 8 track built in so you can get an 8 track cassette converter to play cassettes I would release music on that because it funky

In Dallas, there was an 8 track museum (now gone), curated by Big Bucks Burnett. You can google it.

They were the portable music go-to bk in the 70s. And then by 1978-79, cassettes were doing a fast take over, and by then, we were chucking 8track tapes at the wall to watch them explode. Lol By 1980, 8tracks were DONE. I think the last one I bought on 8trk, was _Pink Floyd-The Wall.._ And even by then, I was getting ‘made fun of’ for still buying it on that format 8trk tapes are not something to be romanticized. They were a Very Flawed format from the start. (I remember saying to myself back in the 70s, that those things sucked- we all loved when cassettes took over) In my opinion, you would be wasting your money getting into those things today.

When searching for a change of career I looked into becoming a DJ on a radio station. That was about the mid 1990s. We had already gone through the cassette era, and the 8 Track era was old and almost gone. So, I was surprised that radio stations were still using 8 tracks! The need for "carts" (8 track tapes - short for cartridges) wasn't dead yet. Even the most modern radio stations were still using 8 tracks. First you have to understand how they work. The tape in a cart is a continuous loop, it will play forever if you don't stop it. The tape is wound around an internal spindle and tape is pulled from the INNER side of the tape where it meets the spindle. (A special lubricant is on the other side of the tape to allow slippage) It then passes over the magnetic head that reads and plays it and then the tape goes back to the OUTSIDE of the tape that's wound around the spindle, Like one big loop. With commercial 8 Tracks players the tape would have 8 "channels" on the tape. From the left to the right side of the tape, starting left 1,2,3,4 and so on, to 8 at the right side of the tape, like stacked gears on a 10-speed bicycle. So, pushing the "Track" button was like making the chain on your bike go over to the next gear. This would cause the magnetic head to play from the "next" track. Radio stations would use the exact same tapes but only needed two tracks, the content track and the cue track. Each "cart" would have only 1 song or commercial dedicated to that 1 cart. To make a "beginning" spot on the tape, when you pressed the "record" button to record music or ads onto the tape the cart machine would place a 1000 Hertz tone on the cue track. That would mark where the song or ad started. Only the cart player would "hear" that tone and stop therefore cueing up the tape. When the content was done the DJ would press "Fast Forward" and it would make the tape run up to that tone and stop. Ready for the next time to play, then the DJ would pop out the tape and put it back in its slot on the wall. This went on into the end of the 90s. As a matter of fact, in the 1996 movie "Jingle All The Way" with Arnold Schwarzenegger there's a scene where Arnold and Sinbad try to take over a radio station. In the control room where the DJ is you can see racks of CDs on the left wall and racks of 8-track carts on the right wall. The pinnacle of the cross-over to digital. So carts went on longer than you think! I've heard some old stations still use them, although even the form of the cart was so beloved they made cart sized mini-CD holders that went into special mini-CD players that played the same way. Want to see how carts worked? Check out the original patent 2,876,005 from 1959 on the Patent Office web site.

I started with 8 track tapes in the late 70s when I was 13 and my mom bought me a portable 8-track player. Later I got stereo with record player and 8-track and switched to buying vinyl records. Sure, you couldn't rewind an 8-track, but some players *did* have a fast forward function. And of course, the big advantage of 8-track over other media is that the tape is set up as an endless loop. The tape would play over and over and over again until you removed the tape. Which is why some restaurants and stores had those systems that were essentially giant 8-track tape players that would hold something like 4 hours of music on them. The Taco Bueno restaurants used to play Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass' Greatest Hits in an endless loop on such a system. Of course, some players not only had fast forward, but auto stop when it reached the end of the tape, if you *didn't* want to play the tape endlessly. With it's 1/4 inch tape width, twice that of cassette tape, there's no reason that 8-track couldn't have been very high quality if manufacturers had thought people wanted such quality on 8-tracks. But they didn't do it. People liked cassettes better, so high quality cassette systems were developed instead. Frankly, I'm not surprised that someone, somewhere, is still making 8-track tapes, but they're pretty useless unless you have a 8-track player to play them on. I had trouble keeping my player working, and other used players I found also were not in the best of conditions for playing. I eventually replaced most of my 8-tracks with records or CDs, or sometimes both!

Local radio stations were using 8 track technology well into the mid 1990s as it was a perfect format for playing jingles and adverts until computer technology allowed DJ's to start doing the same things. However I'm amazed the big record labels continued releasing output on it right up until 1988 as I would have though Compact Disc and cassettes would have killed it off before then. I would have thought car manufacturers had stopped installing the players by the late 1970s too.

8-tracks deserve to be celebrated and remembered as the first portable music format. (Portable record players existed, but you couldn't move them.) For the first time, people could choose their own music on the go, and not be dependent on radio for entertainment - or just as importantly, the ability to play music in places without any radio reception. But quality, reliability, being unable to jump between songs and (worst of all) split songs made them an aggravation. They have their place in history, and that place IS in history. They won't and shouldn't come back.

"And they were all [in] brand-new..." * _...condition._

Some players had Fast Forward actually You mentioned a link but there is no link

Some players had Fast Forward actually

Here in Australia 8 track never took off. From the late 60s the cassette was kings.

I have several milk crates full of 8-tracks and a Pioneer H-R100 deck as part of my kit. Don't really listen to them much these days, as they were a little before my time, but I think 8-tracks are awesome. Love the portable units you showed in the video. Sad that Walkmans are preserved but those are not.

Voyager 1 & 2 are rumored to have used 8-track tapes for data storage!!

8 track tapes are a close relative to the NAB carts that were often used in radio stations. With that being said for many years I used modified 8 track decks and carts for theater sound effects. On one's where I wanted a sound to loop repeatedly I would defeat the sensing foil and on one's for spot effects I either reworked the length of the tape in the cart or added a que tone on one of the two audio channels that told the deck to stop in the same manner as a professional NAB deck would. The reason I used the 8 track system comes down to cost considerations NAB decks cost into the thousands of dollars while 8 track decks and some simple mods and additional circuits only a couple of hundred dollars at most also the sound quality was sufficient for my application .

I have several 8 track decks that can fast forward .. My Pioneer H R100 Fast Forwards..

"They say" that minidiscs you record yourself on later models of recorders have better quality than factory-pressed minidiscs because the encoding got better over time. I don't have great ears so I cant tell, so I'm looking forward to any videos you make on the subject. There are a lot of comments here about minidisc being worse than CD because the compression is lossy. I wonder if they've even listened to a minidisc. In theory the compression discards frequencies that can't be heard. And surely a good DAC in a MD player would give a better sound than a poor DAC in a CD player. MD was never meant to be better, it was meant to be more portable. It's certainly a more interesting experience than CD. But what would I know, I like minidiscs and even cassettes. Oh, and I made quite a few videos on minidisc on my channel. Thanks for the video.

"They say" that minidiscs you record yourself on later models of recorders have better quality than factory-pressed minidiscs because the encoding got better over time. I don't have great ears so I cant tell, so I'm looking forward to any videos you make on the subject. There are a lot of comments here about minidisc being worse than CD because the compression is lossy. I wonder if they've even listened to a minidisc. In theory the compression discards frequencies that can't be heard. And surely a good DAC in a MD player would give a better sound than a poor DAC in a CD player. MD was never meant to be better, it was meant to be more portable. It's certainly a more interesting experience than CD. But what would I know, I like minidiscs and even cassettes. Oh, and I made quite a few videos on minidisc on my channel. Thanks for the video.

Stop spreading nonsense that 8-track was anywhere close to cassette. They were TERRIBLE. They were made for convenience in the car market and fidelity was not a focus.

It is only recently I found out the tapes don't go in all the way, I always thought ppl just left them half way outside so they can just stick them back in for future playing 😅

I think 8 tracks were terrible. I think cassettes were the best, better than cds because cds would scratch easy and skip while being played in cars. Cassettes always played unless you left them on tge seat or dash on a hot summer day but the players goypt bettercand better in quality the longer they were out, I think we should go back to cassette tapes.

Cassettes recorded in a 3head deck with BIAS & LEVEL CAL are super good even type one

I copied all my CDs onto digital format. I never have to go looking for a song now, as the jukebox knows what it is.

Not 100% sure who “they” are, maybe it’s explained in the video. 🤷‍♂️ You can easily get 8-track tapes made in 2024 if you know where to look.

Only the absolute cheepiest players lacked the ability to FF.

I have never seen an 8-Track tape in real life

im like really really new into this stuff, so in my opinion from what i’ve gathered lately, 8 tracks were a big deal in a time music was only available from radio, cassettes, records, etc. I think they’re cool regardless of not being able to rewind & a huge load of cleaning & repairing a tape especially its player. just today i got a Hitachi TRQ 134D player that not only plays the tape, but also records, fast forward & eject mechanics. right now the eject mechanism is gummed up & i’m currently cleaning it to finally play some of favorite albums on an 8 track (Pink Floyd Animals for example). I like 8 tracks despite their many many many issues people had both past & present; just my opinion y’know.

@1:59 "It didn't sound horrible." Now there's a sale's pitch.

8 tracks was a technology back in the day to make music compact with the cassette tape. The 8 track tape doesn't sound that good and could blow up on you

Has anybody ever resin molded these? I’m gonna release my album on 8 track but I don’t wanna sell people used carts >.<

Eight track tapes sounded reasonably decent, especially when you’re in a driving car. Part of the problem was tape head alignment. True, there were eight tracks, but they were fitted onto a 1/4 inch wide tape so alignment had to be precise or the misaligned head (or if the tape itself was slightly misaligned) would pick up another track.

My Panasonic 8 track tape deck will record, has a fast forward button and an eject button. I play 8 track tapes occasionally and I have a collection of about 100 or so that I have replaced the aluminum sensor and the foam cushion on. When you buy used 8 tracks you have to take them apart and replace these items in order for them to play reliably.

You could fast forward them, if your player had that function. Rewinding was impossible.

I still have a couple of 8-Track players and many tapes !!!

Mom bought a home 8-track player in the early 1970's, which came with bookshelf speakers the same day she bought me a portable audio cassette recorder from the local "Barker's" department store. I wanted a cassette player after seeing one used in a class at elementary school, and guess, since I wasn't with her, the salesman probably talked her into buying the 8-track home deck also. The portable cassette recorder/player was a Panasonic. The home 8-track (no recording capability) was a "Barker's" store branded machine with a wood grain finish. That Panasonic cassette recorder in the early 1970's eventually lead to me starting my "pretend radio show" thing in 1979 (although by then I had a newer recorder). Still have, and have digitized the hundreds of hours my old friends and I made in the 80's. Mom only bought around six 8-tracks during the time she used the player she bought for herself. I remember the Hank Williams and Charlie Pride greatest hits compilations. Always found it annoying the tracks would switch mid-song. Cassettes didn't do that.