Long gone are the days of mixtapes. They may have first started out as dubbed live-performance and song demo mixtapes from artists, but eventually, people began using them to record and share what were effectively their own playlists at the time. Today’s music sharing options are much less rudimentary. You can throw a few media files on a USB thumb drive, use cloud services like Spotify, or even share them on a platform like YouTube to curate a saved playlist. It’s certainly much less nostalgic, but it is simpler. While it would probably be silly to go completely back to the days of mixtapes, there is a small USB gadget that encompasses the same idea.
Enter the USB Cassette Mixtape. Retailing for $19 for a single tape from a company called Milktape, it’s essentially a USB drive inside a traditional cassette. The USB Type-A device is compatible with PCs and Macs, with the drive actually folding in and tucking away where the old ribbon would be on a traditional cassette. Just as how USB thumb drives come indifferent storage capacities, this device does as well: There’s a 128MB USB Cassette holds about 15 to 20 songs, perfect for a short and sweet playlist. Meanwhile, the larger-sized 16GB USB Cassette holds approximately 3,500 songs for an absolutely mind-blowing playlist. Of course, you can also use the devices to store large files, videos, photos, transfer data, and so on, like you would with any old USB thumb drive. While it’s not exactly one of the biggest USB drives you can buy today, there’s still a lot of space on it to store media, especially songs.
The USB Cassette Mixtape features plenty of customization options
Another noteworthy fact about Milktape’s USB Cassette Tape is the exterior of the product comes blank with no labels, logos, or any additional information. That allows you to completely customize the look, just like you could with an old-school cassette. You can write your name, your friends’ names, draw some artwork, share information about the playlist you’ve created, or anything else you want to add. You can write and draw all over the blank tape, as well as the case that comes with it.
The USB Cassette Mixtape comes with the cassette-based flash drive, a clear plastic case, a red Milktape-branded cover, and a blank white cover for full customization — everything you need to write, draw, and design to your heart’s content (minus the markers). Feel like you want even more storage space? Maybe you should check out the the DNA cassette tape scientists created that’s capable of holding up to 362 petabytes (362,000 terabytes) of data. That experimental storage media isn’t exactly available on the market, but imagine how many tracks you could store on that?
