Wish your streaming music sounded more analog? Someone made a Bluetooth-to-cassette live converter, and it's very cool
YouTuber Julius Makes created a gadget that receives Bluetooth, writes it live to cassette tape, and then plays it back immediately, because why not?
(Image credit: Julius Makes)
- YouTube Julius Makes creates a Bluetooth-to-tape live converter
- Adds instant analogue crunch to streaming music playlists
- It's just a one-off
Here's something we (sadly?) won't see at CES 2026, but that I love: YouTuber Julius Makes has created a device to offer "Bluetooth streaming on real cassette tape". It's a one-off bit of fun rather than something you can buy, but for people of a certain era, it might be tempting if were a real product.
He explains the full process in the video below (via Hackaday), but it works by receiving the Bluetooth signal and converting it to analogue like any of the best Bluetooth speakers or best wireless headphones, except then it sends the analogue signal to a tape head and writes the sound to a short length of cassette tape.
The tape loops through to a second tape head to play it back immediately, either on the (suitably tinny) built-in speaker, or through the headphone jack. Now you've got the authentic compressed analogue cassette sound – in fact, you can decide to distort the signal on the way through, if you want to get nasty with it.
The creator himself says that this is essentially "a tape delay with extra steps" – but it's less about the function, and more about the style of it – including the fact that he added a giant glowing VU meter that's nearly the length of the whole thing.
Bluetooth Streaming on Real Cassette Tape with Glowing VU Meter - YouTube 
For an at-home project (albeit a fancy one), it's a very cool-looking piece of tech, in my opinion. You've got the classic tape-player controls that looks like piano keys on one end, plus that huge futuristic VU meter up the side, the cassette body as part of it, and the flashes of orange, which is very in for hi-fi right now – just see the Kanto Ren or Audioengine A2+ speakers.
Julius says that he could have made the tape section more compact, but he wanted to show the mechanism – to have the tape running outside of the cassette body with visible brackets – and I think he's right to do it. That's half the fun!
