Just popped in an old cassette yesterday and remembered that old synth sounding noise at the end. A bunch of old cassette tapes had it. Anybody know what it is and was was it for?

madbutcher wrote:Just popped in an old cassette yesterday and remembered that old synth sounding noise at the end. A bunch of old cassette tapes had it. Anybody know what it is and was was it for?

Sometimes cassettes had a few inches of head cleaning tape at the end of the reel, right? Maybe you heard that.

oh man thats the most basic question! i even figured that out when i was a wee lad. ok.

here goes, when your listining to a tape one side may be longer than the other and have more blank tape at the end. now do this. when you hear that beep take it out and flip it. youll hear the same beep on the other side. it lets you know when to flip it for a smooooth continuity

I always thought it was the mating call of synth-o-birds.

I think what you're refering to is the digilog tag.
I'm sure others on here can explain what it was more than I can. I believe it was a mastering process.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XDR_%28audio%29

XDR (eXtended Dynamic Range) is a quality-control and duplication process for the mass-production of pre-recorded audio cassettes. It is a process designed to provide higher quality audio on pre-recorded cassettes by checking the sound quality at all stages of the tape duplication process. With XDR, the dynamic range of audio recorded on a XDR-duplicated cassette can be increased by up to 13 decibels.

This is achieved by many steps, the most prominent being:

* Duplication of the cassettes from a 1" wide master loop tape mounted in a loop bin duplicator (as opposed to standard cassette duplication using a 1/2" master loop tape), resulting in clearer high frequencies, greater bass response, and less noise

* Recording a short test toneburst at the beginning and end of the program material on the cassette, to detect for any loss of audio frequencies in the audio spectrum. The toneburst consists of 11 tones about .175 seconds in length, each an octave apart. These tones are recorded on the cassette, and are read during the duplication process to detect if there is any loss of any audio information.

Several labels such as EMI, Capitol, PolyGram, and others offered cassette releases duplicated with the XDR process.

(all of the above text is from the top link)

I awalys thought it meant
"hey douchebag, flip me over now"