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It's hard out there for a hipster. You have to listen to tapes on an old-school player ironically, but that band you love that nobody has heard of doesn't put out cassettes. What's a music lover to do?

British developer Matt Brailsford has a solution: reworking an old tape recorder to become a Spotify player. Just load one of his cassettes into the player and it reads the tape's NFC ID to play a specific Spotify playlist. The buttons work as advertised, and the recording button serves as a power switch.

Brailsford built the old-new music player in two to three weeks. He started by removing a tape recorder's standard components, then replacing them with a Raspberry Pi, an NFC tag reader, and a custom circuit board. His version of Raspberry Pi is running MusicBox, which includes Spotify streaming features. Each side of the cassette has its own Spotify playlist, just like an old-school tape has an A and B side.

Brailsford told CNET that he was inspired by the iRecorder, an iPod speaker that looks like an old-fashioned tape recorder. "That brought back tons of happy memories of creating mixtapes for (potential) girlfriends […] and it reminded me of how substantial these types of players were back then."

Take a look at how it works:

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