Making A Digital Music Player For Cassette Decks

A hobbyist built a DIY digital music player disguised as a cassette tape, reviving the classic cassette-adapter concept from the tape-to-MP3 transition era. The build uses an ESP32-S3 for processing, a microSD card reader for storage, and a PCM5102 I2S audio codec to generate the analog signal fed into the cassette's read head. SLA-printed gears mimic the spool mechanism needed to trigger auto-stop and reverse features, though the project currently omits capstan motion sensing, a detail the builder plans to address in a future revision.

Source: https://hackaday.com/2026/09/18/making-a-digital-music-player-for-cassette-decks. 8 Sync News only summarizes and links out; content copyright belongs to the authors and original sources.