A tape is a letter you can hear.

What is Record a Tape?

Record a Tape is a free online mixtape maker. You choose songs, record them onto a virtual cassette one at a time, and send the finished tape to someone as a single link. No account, no app, no upload: the cassette deck lives entirely in your browser, and the tape you record is encoded into the link you share.

The experience is deliberately modeled on a 1987 cassette deck, the RT-87: a REC button that records each song in real time, reels that visibly turn while you listen, a counter that ticks, a handwritten label that becomes your tracklist, and an EJECT key that presents the finished tape. If you grew up with cassettes, your hands will remember what to do. If you did not, the deck will teach you in one minute.

Where the idea comes from

Record a Tape started with a simple question: when was the last time you made something for one specific person? Not a post for everyone, not a playlist for the gym, but a sequence of songs recorded slowly, on purpose, for someone you can picture. That is what a mixtape was. You did not shuffle it. You chose the first song like an opening line and the last song like a goodbye. It took an evening to make, and that time was part of the gift.

Somewhere between streaming playlists and social feeds, that ritual disappeared. The goal here is not to bring back plastic and magnetic tape. It is to bring back the deliberateness: one song at a time, a label in your own words, and a single recipient you are thinking about while you record.

Why so slow?

Each song records in real time, about 30 seconds per track, the exact length of an iTunes preview. The reels turn while the song plays because you are supposed to listen. If a song does not deserve those 30 seconds, it does not deserve a place on the tape. The slowness is a filter, not a flaw.

Why no playlist mode?

Because a playlist is for listening and a mixtape is for saying. Playlists optimize for convenience: infinite, reorderable, personalizable to a crowd of one algorithm. A mixtape optimizes for meaning: finite, ordered once, addressed to one human. Record a Tape will never grow a batch import, a drag-and-drop reorder, or a shuffle-to-fill mode. That is not missing functionality. That is the product boundary.

Who builds Record a Tape?

This is a small, independent project built by ITSUKI, one developer working on the web version of a 1987 cassette deck. No company, no roadmap committee, no growth team. The site runs on a free tier on purpose: if the project cannot survive on free infrastructure, it does not deserve to survive.

The machine is the product

The interface is a fully drawn deck: every button, reel, screw, and meter is part of the recording ritual. There is nothing to configure and nothing to learn beyond the six keys your thumbs already know. The machine is the product; everything else is just the manual.

Under the hood

The site is a static Astro application with a Vue island for the deck, a PixiJS scene for the machine rendering, and procedural audio synthesis through the Web Audio API, which is why the repository contains zero audio files. Song discovery uses the iTunes Search API, and playback uses Apple's official preview clips. There is no backend, no database, and no storage of your tapes: a shared tape is encoded into its link and decoded by the person who opens it.

Design principles

The full design bible lives in the repository, but the five working rules are simple enough to print on the box:

• The machine is the interface. Everything that can be expressed as a deck control is a deck control.
• One action, one physical response. Every keypress gets sound, motion, and a visual ack.
• One active surface. Only one thing asks for your attention at a time.
• Ritual over efficiency. Recording one song at a time is the feature.
• The tape is the artifact. The deck is the workshop; the cassette is the gift.

What is next

The near roadmap includes Side B (a flip side so a friend can add tracks after you), an ideas section for mixtape occasions, and shorter share links with rich preview cards for messaging apps. All of it stays inside the same boundary: free to record, free to share, free to receive, forever.

Say hello

Questions, feedback, or a tape that made your day: hello@recordatape.com