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.

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.

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.

No, I did not have access to a cassette tape recorder until 90 or 91.

I didn't because I wasn't alive back then

I too had a ghetto blaster, which must sound pretty weird to people young enough to have never heard of them.

Weird thing, there are many songs in Brazil that have a "DJ " 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

Borrowing?*

Also, most stuff I copied off the radio wouldn't have background noise because you could play music and record directly to cassette. Or maybe it wasn't loud enough in my room to pick anything else up. Same when I recorded my own mixes off CD to cassette.

Well that was useful information, thank you for sharing it.

Seems that narcissistic disorder is not limited to presidents...

tape to tape recording (aka dubbing) was a thing. It would be done in real time unless your deck had high speed dubbing, but that often resulted in a slightly poorer quality.

You could also record direct to tape from radio, LP, or CDs, so not sure why the microphone and background noise thing is an issue. Even before dual decks you could have separates where you could plug the output from one unit into the input of another.

Duplicating tapes from sources was a thing in the 80s for sure.

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)

yeah I started young.

in the 80s Fischer Price had a kids tape deck that had a microphone attached to it. so you could put a blank tape in it and then use the microphone to record whatever you wanted. the quality wasn't bad. so I'd make "mix tapes" for my friends of NES game soundtracks or songs off the radio. with the NES game tracks I would then try to sell the mixtape. songs from like the Batman game, Battletoads, Contra, Mega Man, etc. so I'd make the "first run" recording by holding the microphone up to the TV and then use my Dads stereo that had two decks to copy the "master" to other blank tapes and then sell them to my friends for like $1.

I'd then take the money I made and rent more games to rip the soundtracks and also buy comic books.

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.

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.

That sounds like so much fun

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!

Haha is that a Dead Kennedys tape?
Jello is the fucking man

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.

columbia house was great; i was about 12 and got so many cds for a penny. no idea how it happened since i obviously had no bank account but not questioning

but really my dad had pretty much an entire wall of cds and cassettes in the 90s so i made so many mix tapes when i went to his house on the weekends. i guess thats kinda "pirating music" - at least as far as pre mp3s go.

also taping songs off the radio; i did that all the time to relisten to them along with recording my friends cassettes.

also we shared teddy ruxbin tapes like sugar.

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.

That's why they would do it. Some live DJs still do, even though radio taping is long gone.

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.

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.

You betcha it is!

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.

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.

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.

One of my favorite tshirts from the era had the Alternative Tenacles logo (the bat thing lower right) and said: "Home Taping is Killing Record Industry Profits... Killing Ain't Wrong"

LOL! Let's quiz it to see if we can get it to reply with haikus.

I have boxes of mixtapes I made from the 80's and 90's kicking around somewhere. Some even still sounded half decent last time I fired up the cassette deck. Should get those ripped at some point. Hmmm..

The AT logo is how I recognized it! I'd know that freaky lil bat anywhere

I think it might be a little late for people here to start pirating songs during the 1980s.

I used to get tapes people didn't like and record over them all the time. Half my collection had one thing written on it then a piece of tape over it with what it actually was.

It was the 2000s, not the 80s, but I absolutely recorded songs off the radio and copied library tapes for later. Good times.

The invdividual uses a voice recorder

No, we just used a dual tape deck. Direct dub.

The soviets used to produce bootleg copies of Western vinyls on x-ray since the sixties.

shots

Growing up in the nineties Russia I saw quite a few in home collections all over. Beatles on a ribcage, Judas Priest on a wrist, Black Sabbath on a skull. Some of them were bootlegs of bootlegs: getting your hand on an original recording was so rare and risky.