Tapedeck: a mixtape maker that gives you an image, not a print-out

01  What Tapedeck actually makes

Tapedeck turns a tracklist you type into a picture of a cassette sitting in its clear jewel case. Behind the shell is a printed J-card; on the shell is a paper label with the tape title written across the top in handwriting and the two sides listed in their own columns. The shell has what a cassette actually has: a tape window with two reels, five screw dimples, a moulded plastic body in the colour you picked.

Every one of those pieces is drawn in your browser with the Canvas API while you work — there is no photograph being recoloured and no template being filled in. The object is built from your tape's own values, which is why the paper, the handwriting and the plastic all change together when you change the decade. The page opens with a tape already made, so you can see what you are working towards before you type anything.

It is free, ad-supported, and there is no account and nothing to install. One thing worth saying plainly: Tapedeck does not play anything. It makes the object, not the music.

02  How a tape gets made

There are six controls, and the preview beside them redraws on every keystroke — you never press a render button and wait to find out what you have.

• Tape name — up to 40 characters, with a live count. Press Enter or click away and the title is committed onto the label.
• Decade — six buttons, from the 60s to the 2010s. This is the big one; it restyles everything at once.
• Side A and Side B — ordinary text boxes. One track per line, and a counter under each tells you how many tracks that side is carrying.
• Shell colour — six swatches chosen for the decade you are in, from a palette of fifteen plastics.
• Finish and handwriting — matte or glossy, and one of three hand-lettering styles for the title and tracklist.
• Export size — Story (1080×1920) or square (1080×1080), then Download PNG or Share.

03  The six decades, and what really changes

Picking a decade is not a colour swap. Each preset replaces the backdrop behind the case, the paper and printed texture of the J-card, the ink and print colours, the typeface on the printed J-card spine, the default handwriting, and the shell and finish the tape starts in.

The J-card header is where the decades read most obviously: pop-art target rings for the 60s, curling wood-grain streaks for the 70s, neon gridlines for the 80s, photocopied zine grime speckled across the paper for the 90s, a frosted gel highlight for Y2K, and a single thin hairline for plain 2010s stock. The shells follow — marigold and poppy for the 60s, amber and oxblood for the 70s, glossy onyx for the 80s, grunge teal for the 90s, ice and bubblegum for Y2K, blush and sage for the 2010s.

Switching decade re-skins the whole tape at once: shell, finish and handwriting jump to that decade's defaults. None of it is locked — pick 90s and then put it in a cream shell if you prefer. The preset is a starting point, not a constraint. Every typeface in the app is bundled with it rather than fetched from a font service, so a tape never renders in a substitute face.

There is one small piece of theatre worth knowing about. When you commit the title it settles onto the label over about half a second, with a faint ink-bleed behind it and a single idle turn of the reels. If your system asks for reduced motion, you get the finished label with no animation at all.

04  The export is the point

The reason you came is the file. Tapedeck renders the final image at full size onto an offscreen canvas rather than enlarging the preview, so what you download is drawn at 1080×1920 or 1080×1080 with nothing stretched. The filename comes from your title, so a tape called midnight drive saves as tapedeck-midnight-drive-story.png.

The render is deterministic: the film grain, the slight tilt of the paper label and the resting position of the reels all come from a hash of your tape's state rather than a random number generator. The same tape always produces the identical image, so downloading twice gives you the same file rather than two subtly different ones. A small Tapedeck mark sits in a pill at the bottom of every export; it is part of the image and cannot be turned off in this version.

Share behaves differently depending on what you are holding. On a phone whose browser can hand files to the system share sheet, it opens that sheet with the PNG attached and a line along the lines of "I made a 80s cassette mixtape — 'midnight drive' (8 tracks) on Tapedeck". On desktop, where no share sheet exists, it saves the PNG and copies that same line plus the link to your clipboard — so the image and the sentence that makes it worth opening travel together.

05  Where your tracklist goes

There is no account, no upload and no server holding your tape. The image is drawn on your own device, and the last tape you made is kept in your browser's local storage so it is still there when you come back. That also means it does not follow you to another phone or browser, and clearing your browsing data clears the tape with it.

Because track names end up as text on a picture, there is a filter that masks a small list of profanity and slurs. It replaces a matched word with bullets of the same length rather than deleting it, so you can see your input was filtered instead of wondering why a word vanished. It folds common substitutions and repeated letters before matching, and only matches whole words — "class", "grass" and "assess" are left alone. It is a deliberately conservative list, not a general-purpose content filter.

06  What it deliberately does not do

Knowing what a tool refuses to do is often more useful than a feature list.

• No audio, and no connection to any music service. The titles are text you write onto a label; nothing plays and nothing is looked up.
• No track search or import. You type the names, or paste a tracklist you already have.
• No print output — no fold lines, bleed marks or PDF J-cards. This is aimed at producing an image you post, not a template you cut out.
• No gallery and no public tape pages. Nobody else can browse what you made, and nothing you type becomes a page on the internet.

07  Getting a tape that reads as real

The difference between a cassette that looks convincing and one that looks like a mockup comes down to a handful of choices.

• Keep the title to two or three words. The label is a small rectangle, and handwriting has to stay legible at the size a phone actually shows it.
• Six to ten tracks a side is the sweet spot. The label prints the first several lines and then a "+N more" line, so a fuller side looks like a real tape rather than a dump of text.
• Try the decade's own shell and finish before going off-menu. Matte plastic against paper-toned J-cards is what sells the 60s, 70s and 90s looks.
• Glossy on a dark shell gives a wet-plastic highlight along the case edge; matte on cream, sage or avocado reads like old ABS that has been in a drawer.
• Five of the fifteen shells are translucent and the reels show through them — worth it on the square export, where the object fills more of the frame.
• Match the hand to the decade: Permanent Marker suits a grunge 90s tape, Shadows Into Light fits a neat 2010s pastel, and Caveat is the neutral middle.

08  Questions people ask

Is Tapedeck free, and do I need an account?

Free, and no account. It is supported by ads and runs entirely in your browser. There is nothing to install and no sign-up wall in front of any part of it.

Does Tapedeck play the music, or connect to Spotify?

No. Tapedeck makes the image of a cassette from the track names you type — it does not play audio and is not connected to Spotify, Apple Music or any other service. The titles on the label are text you wrote, nothing more.

What size is the downloaded image?

Two options: Story at 1080×1920 pixels, or square at 1080×1080. Both are PNGs rendered at full resolution rather than enlarged from the on-screen preview, at the size you pick regardless of how big the preview happens to be.

Can I remove the Tapedeck watermark?

No, not in this version. A small Tapedeck mark is baked into the bottom of every exported image.

How many tracks fit on one side?

Twelve is the maximum per side, and each track line is capped at sixty characters. The label itself prints the first several lines and then a "+N more" line, so a long side stays tidy instead of overflowing. Lines past the twelfth are dropped, and the tracklist box warns you when that is happening.

Does it work on a phone?

Yes — it runs in any modern browser on phone, tablet or desktop, and the layout is built for a phone first. On mobile the Share button opens your device's own share sheet with the finished PNG attached; on desktop it saves the image and copies a ready-to-paste line with the link.

09  More from the shelf

• Tierforge — Drag anything into tiers. Post the card.
• Handlelabel — Tap your quirks. Print your warning label.
• Tilewright — Draw seven tiles. Outword the AI.
• Chess — Beat the engine. Post the win.

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