>Why not build a digital audio player that has the cassette tape formfactor? Put whichever flash media directly into the cassette. Transmit audio over the casse

>Why not build a digital audio player that has the cassette tape formfactor? Put whichever flash media directly into the cassette. Transmit audio over the cassette head like those old line-in to tape adapters. Use the wheels of the cassette to charge the device and control playback. I've had a device like that for about 10-15 years. It did exactly that, except for charging (it had an internal USB-charged battery that lasted long enough to not care much about it). Ultimately, I didn't use it for the same reason I haven't used an MP3 player in a long time: if I wanted to play MP3s, I already have a device in my pocket that does it better, and has a screen. One of the appeals of the cassette and vinyl is the finiteness of it, and the idea of having a dedicated physical object for a particular piece of information. It's the idea of "I hold this thing to experince that sound". To get that, one could simply distribute music on cassete-shaped MP3 players that only hold one album... but at that point, might as well do an actual cassette tape. This could find a use for having entire compilations on a cassette; e.g. one magic cassete with all the albums by a particular band, or 12 hours of lofi chillhop to study to. But at that point, using your tape machine's controls to control playback becomes very tedious (do you really want to fast-forward through hours worth of audio, or hit the "next" button 236 times to get to the track you want?). You can limit yourself to, say, only 90 minutes worth of audio per physical medium... at which point you're back to the original cassette. Even my car's MP3 CD player doesn't run into the same problem, because its controls allow it to navigate folders: up/down scroll through folders, left/right scrolls throuh files. I can comfortably click through 10-20 items (which is how many songs fit on a standard audio CD), so I can easily navigate through 10-20 albums with 10-20 songs on an MP3 CD - which is the entire capacity at reasonable compression levels. Audio cassette players simply don't have enough buttons for that; so you're limited to about what the standard cassete can hold before you start putting things on a new cassette. Quality-wise, there's no gain either. But yeah, if you are so desperate to look cool while also going the extra mile to avoid being cool - sure, it would do the job. A bluetooth cassette adapter seems like an easier solution though.